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Fixing merge conflicts in p4merge4/17/2023 ![]() However, there is little empirical knowledge about how developers actually monitor for merge conflicts and plan, perform, and evaluate resolutions. ![]() Thus tool builders and researchers have focused on the prevention and automatic resolution of merge conflicts. They are an inevitable and disruptive aspect of collaborative software development. Merge conflicts occur when developers make concurrent changes to the same part of the code. The main conclusion from our study is that GitHub communication activity itself does not support the emergence or avoidance of merge conflicts even though such communication is associated only with merge scenario code changes or among developers only. Puzzled by these unexpected results, we investigated each covariate, which provided justifications for our findings. Interestingly, we found that the strength of this relationship depends on the merge scenarios’ characteristics, such as the number of lines of code changed. However, in the multivariate analysis, the positive correlation disappeared, not supporting the intuition that GitHub communication helps to avoid merge conflicts. In bivariate analysis, we found a weak positive correlation between GitHub communication activity and the number of merge conflicts. Methodologically, we used a bivariate (Spearman’s rank correlation) and a multivariate (principal component analysis and partial correlations) analysis to quantify their correlation. ![]() To better understand this relation, we analyzed the history of 30 popular open-source projects involving 19 thousand merge scenarios. However, in practice, the role of communication activity for merge conflicts to occur or to be avoided has not been thoroughly investigated. So, it is believed that great communication activity helps to avoid merge conflicts. There is a popular belief that communication and collaboration success are mutually dependent. A notorious problem is that, when integrating code contributions, merge conflicts may occur and resolving them is a time-consuming and error-prone task. Version control systems assist developers in managing concurrent changes to a common code base by tracking all code contributions over time.
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