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Use

In a large-scale application development, there are various development scenarios that come under distributed development. The Design Time Repository (DTR) provides an infrastructure to manage each scenario in a controlled way. The DTR provides the following features for managing distributed development:

  • Integrating changes.

  • Propagating changes.

  • Automatically detecting integration conflicts.

  • Integrating conflict resolution.

  • Propagating a conflict resolution.

Users in Different Geographical Locations

In a multi-user environment for the development of a large-scale application, users work in different geographical locations. Having a single central repository to hold all the development resources, to which all the developers connect to, it is not feasible.

A synchronization of changes might have to be done between:

  • Workspaces present in the same repository.

  • Workspaces present in different repositories.

Releases of Software Components

Since a software component (SC) goes through the cycle of development, different states (or releases) of the SCs are maintained in different workspaces in the repositories. Typically, the workspaces corresponding to different releases of an SC have a common ancestor workspace. Hence a bug present in a common ancestor workspace trickles down to subsequent higher releases. To avoid maintenance of the multiple releases of the SC, it should also be possible to propagate such bug fixes done in a lower release to successor releases.

Delivering Software Components to Customers

Delivering the sources of a SC can be part of the SC delivery. This allows the customer to make its own adaptations of the SC. It should be possible to send across any bug fixes and modifications in the resources without overwriting the adaptations at the customer site. When the delivery of the subsequent releases is made, it should be done such that the customers get a chance to keep their own changes.