Detecting Conflicts on the Level of Changes

Change is inevitable in software development. When several developers are working together on the same project it is possible for conflicts to occur. We propose to make changes explicit and use them to detect conflicts on a change level. We can do this by keeping changes as first class entities. Conflicts can then be detected by merging two sets of change objects and for each change checking if its preconditions are not violated by the changes in the other set.