Collaborative Merge in Distributed Software Development: Who Should Participate?

Merge conflicts, which are rather common throughout the process of software development, are more frequent and complex to resolve when using the distributed software development approach, where developers are geographically dispersed. Normally, in the case of workspace merge, the last developer to merge code is responsible of conciliating the changes made in parallel and resolving conflicts. However, the last developer is not always the best team member to complete this task because he or she may not be familiar with the other parts of the code. With this in mind, the goal of this work is to analyze merge profiles of eight software projects and check if the development log is an appropriate source of information for identifying the key participants for collaborative merge. The obtained results are promising in this direction. KeywordsCollaborative merge; distributed software development; version control