Coven: Brewing better collaboration through software configuration management

Abstract

Our work focuses on building tools to support collaborative software development. We are building a new programming environment with integrated software configuration management which provides a variety of features to help programming teams coordinate their work. In this paper, we detail a hierarchy-based software configuration management system called Coven, which acts as a collaborative medium for allowing teams of programmers to cooperate. By providing a family of inter-related mechanisms, our system provides powerful support for cooperation and coordination in a manner which matches the structure of development teams.