Palantír: Raising Awareness among Configuration Management Workspaces Anita Sarma, Zahra Noroozi, André van der Hoek (Presented by Justin Erenkrantz)
Introduction How do other people’s pending changes affect me? Awareness amongst developers Good vs. bad isolation Optimistic vs. pessimistic locking Direct vs. indirect conflicts
Approach Notification of others’ changes Not a SCM replacement –Plugs-in to existing SCMs –RCS and CVS prototypes created Designed to be non-intrusive Inverts information from pull to push –Reliance upon event-based architecture
Event model Populated Unpopulated Synchronized ChangesInProgress ChangesReverted ChangesCommitted Added Removed Renamed Moved SeverityChanged
Specifics Written in Java Uses Siena as event platform Severity factor –How much has changed –Computed by contextual diff Visualization ability
Strength and Weaknesses Non-obtrusive Multiple SCM systems Scalable Promotes good isolation Non-modelable events? –CVS renames Dealing with changeset SCMs? Indirect conflicts?
Observations Initial step in right direction Good separation from the SCM –Hints at general applicability What happens when someone does not use the tool? Does this promote the right type of awareness?