An approach to limit the WYNOT problem

Software evolution in a cooperative environment, where a pool of maintainers/developers contribute to the overall system changes, is challenging due to several factors, such as the poor communication among individuals and the high number of produced changes. Conflicting or contradictory changes, unforeseen or unexpected dependencies may result in a non working system. We propose a strategy aimed to reduce the risk of conflicting changes in a maintenance cooperative environment. To evaluate the feasibility of our approach and to attempt to estimate the size of the code to be scrutinised per single changed line, we developed a number of tools and tested our approach on release 30 of DDD software system. The preliminary results are encouraging. Potentially impacted LOCS per single changed LOC is on the average less than 4.