Understanding Conflicts Arising from Collaborative Development

When working in a collaborative development environment, developers implement tasks separately. Consequently, during the integration process, one might have to deal with conflicting changes. Previous studies indicate that conflicts occur frequently and impair developers' productivity. Such evidence motivates the development of tools that try to tackle this problem. However, despite the existing evidence, there are still many unanswered questions. The goal of this research is to investigate conflict characteristics in practice through empirical studies and use this body of knowledge to improve strategies that support software developers working collaboratively.