What causes merge conflicts?

Menezes, José William; Trindade, Bruno; Pimentel, João Felipe; Moura, Tayane Silva Fernandes de; Plastino, Alexandre; Murta, Leonardo; Costa, Catarina

doi:10.1145/3422392.3422440

Cited by 6 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Based on the related work (Table 1), attributes related to the branching duration are very common, but only two studies mention the branch duration as an indicator of conflict. Dias et al (2020) and Menezes et al (2020) found a relation between the duration of the merge scenario and the conflict occurrence. Dias et al (2020) mentioned that "contributions developed over periods of time are more likely associated with conflicts".…”

Section: ) Branches Are Very Common and Developers Have The Autonomy ...mentioning

confidence: 96%

“…Dias et al (2020) mentioned that "contributions developed over periods of time are more likely associated with conflicts". Menezes et al (2020) found that the timing attributes have a (small) impact on the conflicts. Vale et al (2020) verified the relation between Github communication and the occurrence of merge conflicts.…”

Section: ) Branches Are Very Common and Developers Have The Autonomy ...mentioning

confidence: 98%

“…The authors also mentioned that merging branches is not likely to be a simple task, since one needs to understand and merge contributions performed by different developers, probably working on different assignments (Accioly et al, 2018). Menezes et al (2020) found that merge conflicts happened in 7.11% of their data set, but the number of merge conflicts is more than 20% in some projects. Kasi and Sarma (2013) analyzed a set of projects and found that merge conflicts ranged from 7.6% to 19.3%.…”

Section: Merge Conflictsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In a previous study, we also investigated size and timing attributes that can lead to conflicts (Menezes et al, 2020). We conducted an empirical study with 80 open source projects, including 182,273 merge scenarios, written in ten programming languages.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Understanding and Analyzing Factors that Affect Merge Conflicts from the Perspective of Software Developers

Ribeiro

Costa²,

Santos³

2022

JSERD

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Merge conflicts are very common in collaborative software development, which is supported mainly by the use of branches that can be potentially merged. In this context, several studies have proposed mechanisms to avoid conflicts whenever possible and some identified factors that lead to conflicts. In this article, we report on an investigation of factors that can lead to conflicts or that can somehow reduce the chances of conflict from the developers’ perspective. To do so, based on related work, we conducted two empirical studies with Brazilian software developers to both understand and analyze factors that affect merge conflicts. Firstly, we conducted survey research with 109 software developers to understand how they use branches, the occurrence of conflicts and the resolution process, and factors that can lead to or avoid conflicts. Results showed that the use of branches is very common and mostly has the purpose of creating a new feature or fixing a bug. According to the participants, in most projects, developers have the autonomy to create new branches and sometimes conflicts happen. The main factors that can lead to conflicts are “the time a branch is isolated” and “lack of communication”. On the other hand, the factors cited as good practices to avoid conflicts were “improve team communication” and “less branching duration”. Secondly, we conducted a field study based on interviews with 15 software developers to analyze those factors to understand better what leads to or avoids conflicts in a merge. Finally, this work allowed us to conclude that communication with the team, checking code updates, shorter branch duration, and management are important for software developers, especially when they think about what increases and decreases merge conflicts.

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Section: ) Branches Are Very Common and Developers Have The Autonomy ...mentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: ) Branches Are Very Common and Developers Have The Autonomy ...mentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Merge Conflictsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Understanding and Analyzing Factors that Affect Merge Conflicts from the Perspective of Software Developers

Ribeiro

Costa²,

Santos³

2022

JSERD

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“…This paper is an extended version of a conference paper (Menezes et al, 2020) in which we answered six research questions, focused on the impact of the attributes time, commits, committers, changed files, intersection, and self-conflicts, in the occurrence of merge conflicts. This work complements our previous work by adding two new research questions and three new attributes, the number of changed lines, the commits density, and the programming language.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attributes that may raise the occurrence of merge conflicts

Menezes

Trindade

Pimentel

et al. 2021

JSERD

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Collaborative software development typically involves the use of branches. The changes made in different branches are usually merged, and direct and indirect conflicts may arise. Some studies are concerned with investigating ways to deal with merge conflicts and measuring the effort that this activity may require. However, the investigation of factors that may reduce the occurrence of conflicts needs more and deeper attention. This paper aims at identifying and analyzing attributes of past merges with and without conflicts to understand what may induce direct conflicts. We analyzed 182,273 merge scenarios from 80 projects written in eight different programming languages to find characteristics that increase the chances of a merge to have a conflict. We found that attributes such as the number of changed files, the number of commits, the number of changed lines, and the number of committers demonstrated to have the strongest influence in the occurrence of merge conflicts. Moreover, attributes in the branch that is being integrated seem to be more influential than the same attributes in the receiving branch. Additionally, we discovered positive correlations between the occurrence of conflicts and both the duration of the branch and the intersection of developers in both branches. Finally, we observed that PHP, JavaScript, and Java are more prone to conflicts.

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