CI/CD-Enhanced Conflict Resolution: Feasibility and Potential for Smarter Merging

Context

Concurrent editing in cooperative software development often results in merge conflicts. Human effort is needed to resolve such merge conflicts. Studying merge conflicts and how to (semi-)automatically resolve them is an active research area.

Motivation

Recent research results have shown that the majority of merge conflicts is often resolved using simple patterns. However, an open question is how to decide, for a given conflict, whether it can be resolved using a simple pattern and, if so, which one. In this work, we want to explore whether CI/CD pipelines, notably the test and build stage, may help in answering this question.

Goal

The goal of this work to develop a technique that, given a conflicting merge, creates all the possible resolution variants in which these conflicts are resolved according to the aforementioned simple resolution patterns. The suitability of these variants, in turn, shall then be assessed by running the test and build stages.

Requirements

Pointers