Awareness techniques have been proposed and studied to aid developer understanding, efficiency, and quality of software produced. Some of these techniques have focused on either direct or indirect conflicts in order to prevent, detect, or resolve these conflicts as they arise from a result of source code changes. While the techniques and tools for direct conflicts have had large success, tools either proposed or studied for indirect conflicts have had common issues of information overload, false positives, scalability, information distribution and many others. To better understand these issues, this dissertation will focus on exploring the world of indirect conflicts through 4 studies. The first two studies presented will focus on motivational circumstances which occur during the software development life cycle and cause indirect conflicts. Developers interactions are studied in order to create a tool which can aid in the workflows around indirect conflicts. The second two studies present a deeper investigation into why most indirect conflict tools fail to attract developer interest through exploring the root causes of indirect conflicts and how tools should be properly built to support developer workflows. / Graduate / 0984

Awareness techniques have been proposed and studied to aid developer understanding, efficiency, and quality of software produced. Some of these techniques have focused on either direct or indirect conflicts in order to prevent, detect, or resolve these conflicts as they arise from a result of source code changes. While the techniques and tools for direct conflicts have had large success, tools either proposed or studied for indirect conflicts have had common issues of information overload, false positives, scalability, information distribution and many others. To better understand these issues, this dissertation will focus on exploring the world of indirect conflicts through 4 studies. The first two studies presented will focus on motivational circumstances which occur during the software development life cycle and cause indirect conflicts. Developers interactions are studied in order to create a tool which can aid in the workflows around indirect conflicts. The second two studies present a deeper investigation into why most indirect conflict tools fail to attract developer interest through exploring the root causes of indirect conflicts and how tools should be properly built to support developer workflows. / Graduate / 0984