by Jeremy Benjamin Warner towards a Master of Science in the Computer Science department Supervised by Professor Philip J. Guo Computer Science Department University of Rochester May 2016
This thesis analyzes perceptions towards collaborating with version control and introduces a new system, CodePilot, for project-wide synchronous collaborative programming backed by version control. We review our study of programmers using the system to collaborate on web development tasks, and suggest that combining synchronous collaborative programming with version control as asynchronous collaboration is a novel, powerful paradigm in programmer collaboration. It not only makes version control more accessible for novice programmers, but prompts more experienced programmers to coordinate and parallelize their development efforts.