UT ECE professors Miryung Kim and Dewayne Perry have been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for research titled Analytical Support for Investigating Software Modifications in Collaborative Development Environment. Prof. Kim will serve as principal investigator Prof. Perry will serve as co-principal investigator.

This research project will produce analytical support for investigating software modifications in collaborative development environment called CHIME. First, CHIME will provide an extensible, logical change analysis framework that identifies software modifications relevant to one's own code modification according to various kinds of delta relationships. The users of the framework can import, select, and extend various notions of interference, dependence, similarity, and co-occurrence relationships among individual software modifications. Second, CHIME will provide a search interface to empower users to ask and answer questions about the content, structure, and context of code changes across multiple revisions. In order to reduce programmers' burden on formulating search queries, we will conduct empirical studies with professional developers to identify frequently asked questions about past and present software modifications. The resulting list of the questions will be provided as template queries that the developers can use or refine. Third, CHIME will provide targeted notifications about others' software modifications by monitoring other developers' change-events that are relevant to the developer's own modification. The impact of this research will be substantially improved developer productivity in a rapidly-evolving, collaborative and parallel software development. CHIME will reduce awareness information overload and will help users manage the impact of others' code changes on their code, detect and resolve merge conflicts early, and coordinate shared tasks, contributing toward early detection and removal of integration and interference failures.