Prevent Collaboration Conflicts with Fine Grained Pessimistic Locking

Martin Eyl, Clemens Reichmann, Klaus D. Müller-Glaser

2017

Abstract

There are two main strategies to support the collaboration of software team members working concurrently on the same source code: pessimistic locking and optimistic locking. Optimistic locking is used far more often because a pessimistic lock on the smallest unit stored in the Software Configuration Management (SCM), which is a usually a file, often causes conflict situations, where a developer wants to change the already locked code. Optimistic locking can cause direct and indirect merge conflicts which are costly to resolve and affect productivity. The novelty of our approach is to define a meta-model for the source code (Abstract Syntax Tree) and use pessimistic locking on model artefacts and therefore allow parallel editing of the same class or even method but still preventing direct and indirect merge conflicts. Thereby the developer keeps an isolated workspace and the developer decides when to commit the finished source code. This paper introduces a concept for this solution and a prototype based on Eclipse.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Eyl M., Reichmann C. and Müller-Glaser K. (2017). Prevent Collaboration Conflicts with Fine Grained Pessimistic Locking . In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development - Volume 1: MODELSWARD, ISBN 978-989-758-210-3, pages 312-319. DOI: 10.5220/0006119703120319

in Bibtex Style

@conference{modelsward17,
author={Martin Eyl and Clemens Reichmann and Klaus D. Müller-Glaser},
title={Prevent Collaboration Conflicts with Fine Grained Pessimistic Locking},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development - Volume 1: MODELSWARD,},
year={2017},
pages={312-319},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0006119703120319},
isbn={978-989-758-210-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development - Volume 1: MODELSWARD,
TI - Prevent Collaboration Conflicts with Fine Grained Pessimistic Locking
SN - 978-989-758-210-3
AU - Eyl M.
AU - Reichmann C.
AU - Müller-Glaser K.
PY - 2017
SP - 312
EP - 319
DO - 10.5220/0006119703120319