On the Selection of Concurrency Control Policies for Configuration Management

Currently, the number of developers involved in a software development project is increasing because of the need to deliver systems with higher complexity and quality and to reduce time-to-market. In order to have the software development process executing in an organized way, we must provide mechanisms to control concurrent access over the project artifacts. These mechanisms are implemented by concurrency control policies in version control systems, which may allow (optimistic policy) or inhibit (pessimistic policy) parallel development. This work presents the Orion approach, which analyzes the project historical changes and selects the most appropriate concurrency control policy for each software element. In addition, it identifies critical elements, which are candidates to refactoring. This selection aims at minimizing conflict situations, and thus improving the development team productivity. A prototype was built to enable the application of the proposed approach and two experimental studies were performed as a preliminary evaluation.