Evaluating Refactoring-Aware Merging: An Experimental Study

Context

Traditional merge tools (e.g., Git merge) often treat refactorings as conflicting changes, leading to unnecessary conflicts. On the contrary, a refactoring-aware approach may recognize and account for refactorings, preventing false positives in conflict detection.

Motivation

While the concept of refactoring-aware merging has been proposed in the literature, practical experience with tooling remains limited and not widely adopted in mainstream development workflows.

Goal

This work aims to experimentally evaluate the potential and limitations of refactoring-aware merging by setting up an experimental environment, populating it with controlled conflict scenarios, and analyzing the results.

Project Outline

  1. Create (and extend during the project) a catalog of minimalistic examples for refactoring-aware merge scenarios.
  2. Introduce a detailed logging in the refactoring-aware merge tool, recording the computational steps (and their assumptions).
  3. Design and implement a, e.g., web-based, visualization of the process log.

Requirements

Pointers