Bachelor and Master Theses
To apply for conducting this thesis, please contact the thesis supervisor(s).
| Title: | Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types for Collaborative Software Development: A Systematic Literature Review |
| Subject: | Software engineering |
| Level: | Advanced |
| Description: |
In distributed systems, multiple nodes might perform concurrent modifications over the same replicated data. To avoid inconsistencies, dedicated mechanisms to coordinate nodes throughout their execution shall be in place. For instance, strong consistency-preserving mechanisms solve the problem by introducing a broadcasting synchronization barrier after each modification to propagate the applied changes across the network’s nodes. Despite avoiding inconsistencies, strong consistency introduces considerable synchronization overhead in the system and may yield severe scalability limitations, often not acceptable in distributed applications. Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) are distributed data structures guaranteeing eventual consistency while supporting concurrent and independent modifications on different network nodes without coordination. Various different CRDTs have been proposed in the literature, all sharing the common characteristic of limiting their modification through a set of commutative operations, hence reducing change propagation to the composition of commutative binary operators. Modern software systems are concurrently developed by geographically distributed teams. In this context, strong consistency is not always required but rather represents an obstacle imposed by the existing development tools for inherently collaborative practices such as pair programming. Intuitively, eventual consistency represents a much more suitable solution for these cases. The main objective of this thesis is to investigate existing approaches and solutions for the definition and maintenance of CRDTs. The focus is on collaborative software development, where multiple developers work on the same resource without explicit and continuous synchronization. The expected outcomes are: - Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of the existing literature on CRDTs for collaborative development - Thesis Report Supervisor(s): Lorenzo Addazi, Federico Ciccozzi Examiner: Jan Carlson |
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