Leveraging Structure in Software Merge: An Empirical Study

Seibt, Georg; Heck, Florian; Cavalcanti, Guilherme; Borba, Paulo; Apel, Sven

doi:10.1109/tse.2021.3123143

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…However, the 50 merge scenarios we investigated have more than 1,300 unique merge conflicts. As far as we are aware, this is the most extensive qualitative analysis performed in terms of unique merge conflicts [17], [18], [21] Naturally, investigating additional merge scenarios could reveal more for each tool.…”

Section: Threats To Validitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Leßenich et al [19] proposed auto-tuning, an approach that switches between structured and unstructured merging, and implemented JDime to demonstrate their approach. Seibt et al [21] recently performed a largescale empirical study with unstructured, semi-structured, and structured merge algorithms and their findings suggest that combined strategies are promising moving forward.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While there are several research efforts that work on understanding the structure of the underlying code to automate more merge-conflict resolutions [11], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], there are mainly two efforts that specifically focus on refactorings. The first is by Dig et al [15] that proposes an operation-based refactoring-aware merging technique.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Systematic Comparison of Two Refactoring-aware Merging Techniques

Ellis¹,

Nadi²,

Dig³

2021

Preprint

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Dealing with merge conflicts in version control systems is a challenging task for software developers. Resolving merge conflicts is a time-consuming and error-prone process, which distracts developers from important tasks. Recent work shows that refactorings are often involved in merge conflicts and that refactoring-related conflicts tend to be larger, making them harder to resolve. In the literature, there are two refactoring-aware merging techniques that claim to automatically resolve refactoring-related conflicts; however, these two techniques have never been empirically compared. In this paper, we present RefMerge, a Java re-implementation of the first technique, which is an operation-based refactoring-aware merging algorithm. We compare RefMerge to Git and the state-of-the-art graph-based refactoring-aware merging tool, IntelliMerge, on 2,001 merge scenarios with refactoring-related conflicts from 20 open-source projects. We find that RefMerge completely resolves 143 (7%) merge scenarios while IntelliMerge resolves only 78 (4%). We additionally conduct a qualitative analysis of the differences between the three merging algorithms and provide insights of the strengths and weaknesses of each tool.

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Section: Threats To Validitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%