Paper Info
Title
Are Refactorings to Blame? An Empirical Study of Refactorings in Merge Conflicts
Abstract
With the rise of distributed software development, branching has become a popular approach that facilitates collaboration between software developers. One of the biggest challenges that developers face when using multiple development branches is dealing with merge conflicts. Conflicts occur when inconsistent changes happen to the code. Resolving these conflicts can be a cumbersome task as it requires prior knowledge about the changes in each of the development branches. A type of change that could potentially lead to complex conflicts is code refactoring. Previous studies have proposed techniques for facilitating conflict resolution in the presence of refactorings. However, the magnitude of the impact that refactorings have on merge conflicts has never been empirically evaluated. In this paper, we perform an empirical study on almost 3,000 well-engineered open-source Java software repositories and investigate the relation between merge conflicts and 15 popular refactoring types. Our results show that refactoring operations are involved in 22% of merge conflicts, which is remarkable taking into account that we investigated a relatively small subset of all possible refactoring types. Furthermore, certain refactoring types, such as EXTRACT METHOD, tend to be more problematic for merge conflicts. Our results also suggest that conflicts that involve refactored code are usually more complex, compared to conflicts with no refactoring changes.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/SANER.2019.8668012
2019 IEEE 26th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Merging,Tools,Java,Task analysis,Open source software,Control systems
Task analysis,Software engineering,Computer science,Conflict resolution,Blame,Software,Merge (version control),Java,Code refactoring,Empirical research
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-7281-0591-8
8
0.43
References 
Authors
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mehran Mahmoudi1140.84
Sarah Nadi237524.37
Nikolaos Tsantalis374332.14