1989 Reports

A Flexible Transaction Model for Software Engineering

Kaiser, Gail E.

It is generally recognized that the classical transaction model, providing atomicity and serializability, is too strong for certain application areas since it unnecessarily restricts concurrency. We are concerned with supporting cooperative work in multi-user design environments, particularly teams of programmers cooperating to develop and maintain software systems. We present an extended transaction model that meets the special requirements of software engineering projects, describe possible implementation techniques, and discuss a number of issues regarding the incorporation of such a model into multi-user software development environments.