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Information needs for integration decisions in the release process of large-scale parallel development

Published: 11 February 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Version control branching allows an organization to parallelize its development efforts. Releasing a software system developed in this manner requires release managers, and other project stakeholders, to make decisions about how to integrate the branched work. This group decision-making process becomes very complex in the case of large-scale parallel development. To better understand the information needs of release managers in this context, we conducted an interview study at a large software company. Our analysis of the interviews provides a view into how release managers make integration decisions, organized around ten key factors. Based on these factors, we discuss specific information needs for release managers and how the needs can be met in future work.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW '12: Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
February 2012
1460 pages
ISBN:9781450310864
DOI:10.1145/2145204
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 11 February 2012

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Author Tags

  1. decision support
  2. integration
  3. parallel development
  4. release management
  5. team meetings
  6. version control

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CSCW '12: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
February 11 - 15, 2012
Washington, Seattle, USA

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CSCW '12 Paper Acceptance Rate 164 of 415 submissions, 40%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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