A Characterization Study of Merge Conflicts in Java Projects

In collaborative software development, programmers create branches to add features and fix bugs tentatively, then merge integrate edits. When edits from different textually overlap (i.e., textual conflicts ) or lead compilation runtime errors build test ), it is challenging for developers remove such conflicts. Prior work proposed tools detect solve They investigate how relate code smells the development process. However, many questions are still not fully investigated, as what types of exist in real-world applications handle them. For this article, we used automated merge, compilation, testing reveal three 208 open-source repositories: conflicts, causing errors), triggering failures). We manually inspected 538 their resolutions characterize angles. Our analysis revealed interesting phenomena. First, higher-order conflicts) harder resolve, while existing mainly focus on Second, resolved most by applying similar multiple program locations; conflict share common editing patterns implying great opportunities future tool design. Third, 64% true keeping complete either a left right branch. Unlike prior studies, our research first time thoroughly characterizes with special limitations will shed light merge.