Using dependency graphs to support collaboration over GitHub: The Neo4j graph database approach

Abstract

Software Configuration Management Systems capture direct conflicts which arise due to concurrent editing of same shared artifact. However, indirect conflicts, arising due to concurrent editing of related artifacts by collaborative developers, might eventually evade the build process employed by the underlying SCM. Additional collaborative software development tools have been developed, that supplement existing SCM systems, by providing change awareness information about potential indirect conflicts. In this paper, we propose the tool named Collaboration Over GitHub (COG), that provides support for collaborative software development over GitHub and also captures indirect conflicts at finer levels of granularity. For this, COG converts project repositories into dependency graphs which are stored as Neo4j Graph Databases. These graphs store structural and dependency information obtained from codebases and are used for identifying conflicts and affected artifacts.