An Approach to Limit the Wynot Problem

Software evolution in a cooperative environment, where a pool of maintainers/developers contribute to the overall system changes, is challanging due to several factors, such as the poor communication among individuals and the high number of produced changes. Conflicting or contradictory changes, unforeseen or unexpected dependencies may result in a non working system. We propose a strategy aimed to reduce the risk of conflicting changes in a maintenance cooperative environment. To evaluate the feasibility of our approach and to attempt to estimate the size of the code to be scrutined per single changed line, we developed a number of tools and tested our approach on 30 release of DDD software system. The preliminary results are encouraging: potentially impacted LOCS per single changed LOC is on the average less than 4.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ICSM
• Authors: Giuliano Antoniol, Gerardo Casazza, Aniello Cimitile, Maria Tortorella
• Keywords: Contradictory Changes, Cooperative Environment, ICSM 2000, Non Working System, Software Engineering