Characterizing the Problem of Developers' Assignment for Merging Branches

Abstract

During the software development process, artifacts are constructed and manipulated by many developers working in parallel. A common practice to manage parallel development is the use of branches in the version control system. Usually, at some point, the merge of these branches may be necessary. This process can combine two independent and eventually long sequences of commits, which may have been performed by different developers. Conflicts resulting from the merge of parallel changes may arise. When these conflicts are not automatically solved by the version control system, the developers in charge of the merge process must act. Normally, the developers' knowledge regarding the changes performed in parallel is usually not taken into consideration when assigning developers to the merge task. With this in mind, the goal of this work is to characterize the problem of developers' assignment for merging branches. To do so, this work analyzed merge profiles of eight software projects and check if the development history is an appropriate source of information for identifying the key participants for collaborative merge. In addition, this work presents a survey on developers about what actions they take when they need to merge branches, and especially when a conflict arises during the merge.