DeltaImpactFinder: Assessing Semantic Merge Conflicts with Dependency Analysis
This addresses the issue of bugs introduced during code merging for developers, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing change impact analysis techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of semantic merge conflicts in software development by proposing DeltaImpactFinder, which uses change impact analysis to detect such conflicts by comparing the impact of changes across branches, identifying potential conflict sources when the delta-impact is non-empty.
In software development, version control systems (VCS) provide branching and merging support tools. Such tools are popular among developers to concurrently change a code-base in separate lines and reconcile their changes automatically afterwards. However, two changes that are correct independently can introduce bugs when merged together. We call semantic merge conflicts this kind of bugs. Change impact analysis (CIA) aims at estimating the effects of a change in a codebase. In this paper, we propose to detect semantic merge conflicts using CIA. On a merge, DELTAIMPACTFINDER analyzes and compares the impact of a change in its origin and destination branches. We call the difference between these two impacts the delta-impact. If the delta-impact is empty, then there is no indicator of a semantic merge conflict and the merge can continue automatically. Otherwise, the delta-impact contains what are the sources of possible conflicts.