Object-Oriented Identifier Renaming Correction in Three-Way Merge

There are two traditional concurrency models among the source code management (SCM) systems: lock and merge models. The lock model prevents the concurrent modification on the same files, but the merge model allows the parallel editing, and performs a merge to reconcile the changes. A three-way merge engine is a usual part of SCM systems, some of them attempt to auto-merge the files, but sometimes they fail due to textual-based approaches or semantic conflicts. The merge should produce syntactically correct source files, but semantic correctness cannot be ensured trivially. The best methods treat modifications as semantic changes in high abstraction level, rather than atomic changes. The atomic changes do not reflect the intentions of the developers, therefore discovering those intentions can significantly improve semantic merge approaches. This paper introduces that matching the corresponding identifiers e.g. class, field, method, local variables in the ASTs of the revisions, and detection of renaming takes closer to semantic correctness. Renaming of an identifier can cause semantic errors in the output of the merge. This issue is examined and a solution is elaborated in this work.