Abstract
Parallel changes, in which separate lines of development are carried out by different developments, are a basic fact of developing and maintaining large-scale software systems. Merging parallel versions and variants of source code is a common and essential software engineering activity. When a non-trivial number of conflicts is detected, there is a need to support the maintainer in investigating and resolving these conflicts. In this study, the authors present software conflict resolution recommender (scoreRec), a cost–benefit approach to ranking the conflicting software entities. The contributions of scoreRec lie in the leverage of both structural and semantic information of the source code to generate conflict resolution recommendations, as well as the hierarchical presentation of the recommendations with detailed explanations. The authors evaluate scoreRec through an industrial-strength legacy system developed by computational scientists. The results show that scoreRec offers relevant and insightful information and sound engineering support for conflict resolution. The authors' work also sheds light on the future development of recommendation systems in the context of software merging.
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