Alleviating Merge Conflicts with Fine-grained Visual Awareness

Merge conflicts created by software team members working on the same code can be costly to resolve, and adversely affect productivity. In this work, we suggest the approach of fine-grained merge conflict awareness, where software team members are notified of potential merge conflicts via graphical decoration of the relevant semantic elements, in near real-time. The novelty of this approach is that it allows software developers to pinpoint the element in conflict, such as a method’s body, parameter, return value, and so on, promoting communication about conflicting changes soon after they take place and on a semantic level. We have also conducted a preliminary qualitative evaluation of our approach, the results of which we report in this paper.