A Systematic Comparison Of Two Refactoring Aware Merging Techniques

Download or read book A Systematic Comparison of Two Refactoring-aware Merging Techniques written by Max Ellis and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dealing with merge conflicts in version control systems is a challenging task for software developers. Resolving merge conflicts is a time-consuming and error-prone process, which distracts developers from important tasks. Recent work shows that refactorings are often involved in merge conflicts and that refactoring-related conflicts tend to be larger, making them harder to resolve. In the literature, there are two refactoring-aware merging techniques that claim to automatically resolve refactoring-related conflicts, an operation based refactoring-aware merging approach called MolhadoRef and a graph based refactoring-aware merging approach called IntelliMerge. However, these two techniques have never been empirically compared. In this thesis, wepresent RefMerge, a Java re-implementation of operation-based refactoring aware merging, but built on Git. In addition to contributing this new de sign and implementation of refactoring-aware operation-based merging, thisthesis contains the experimental results of comparing RefMerge to Git and IntelliMerge on 2,001 merge scenarios with refactoring-related conflicts from 20 open-source projects. The results show that RefMerge completely resolves143 (7%) merge scenarios while IntelliMerge resolves only 78 (4%). This thesis also presents a qualitative analysis of the differences between the three merging algorithms and provides insights into the strengths and weaknesses ofeach refactoring-aware tool.