My research topic is Software Configuration Management for Test-Driven Development. I'm an external PhD student of Prof. Wilhelm Hasselbring, head of the Software Engineering Group at the University of Oldenburg.
Most Software Configuration Management (SCM) systems handle versions of source code as versions of plain text. Frequent refactoring poses a problem on these SCM systems, as merge conflicts may occur more often than necessary.
Test-Driven Development leads to many compilable versions of source code. Ideally, unit test are run with every compile, so that each version is tagged with test success or failure. Development, then, can be described as a series of small steps, each of them either a refactoring or a change to the source code.
The goal of my PhD is an SCM tool which records the steps of Test-Driven Development as operations in an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Using these steps may lead to improvements in the following areas:
A prototype for the Eclipse IDE (http://www.eclipse.org) is currently under development.