Annotation-Based Semantic Conflict Prevention in Real-Time Collaborative Programming: Approach, Techniques, Prototype, and User Study

Real-time collaborative programming environments support a group of programmers, who are geographically distributed, to concurrently view and edit a shared set of source code in a real-time fashion. However, this emerging technology has not been widely applied yet, and one critical challenge is the semantic conflict during real-time collaboration. Existing conflict prevention approaches are limited in supporting individual source code files only, with pre-programmed rules that might be inflexible. To address these challenges, we propose a novel semantic conflict prevention approach based on source code annotations, which allow programmers to manually, conveniently and flexibly apply fine-grained conflict prevention rules during real-time collaboration. The proposed approach and techniques have been successfully implemented in a prototype system. User studies and performance evaluations have demonstrated the technical feasibility of the proposed approach and techniques, as well as the prototype's satisfactory efficiency and usability.