A Characterization Study of Merge Conflicts in Java Projects

Abstract

In collaborative software development, programmers create software branches to add features and fix bugs tentatively, and then merge branches to integrate edits. When edits from different branches textually overlap (i.e., textual conflicts ) or lead to compilation and runtime errors (i.e., build and test conflicts ), it is challenging for developers to remove such conflicts. Prior work proposed tools to detect and solve conflicts. They investigate how conflicts relate to code smells and the software development process. However, many questions are still not fully investigated, such as what types of conflicts exist in real-world applications and how developers or tools handle them. For this paper, we used automated textual merge, compilation, and testing to reveal 3 types of conflicts in 208 open-source repositories: textual conflicts, build conflicts (i.e., conflicts causing build errors), and test conflicts (i.e., conflicts triggering test failures). We manually inspected 538 conflicts and their resolutions to characterize merge conflicts from different angles. Our analysis revealed three interesting phenomena. First, higher-order conflicts (i.e., build and test conflicts) are harder to detect and resolve, while existing tools mainly focus on textual conflicts. Second, developers manually resolved most higher-order conflicts by applying similar edits to multiple program locations; their conflict resolutions share common editing patterns implying great opportunities for future tool design. Third, developers resolved 64% of true textual conflicts by keeping complete edits from either a left or right branch. Unlike prior studies, our research for the first time thoroughly characterizes three types of conflicts, with a special focus on higher-order conflicts and limitations of existing tool design. Our work will shed light on future research of software merge.