A Qualitative User Study on Preemptive Conflict Detection

Preemptive conflict detection is the act of detecting a potential merge conflict at an earlier stage than at check in time, and informing the involved developers about it. Researchers have proposed a number of tools and techniques to detect potential merge conflicts. However, barely any study has been conducted to investigate whether the adoption of such tools and techniques brings benefits to developers. We have conducted a qualitative user study to understand how developers behave when dealing with merging and how this behavior changes when they are exposed to preemptive conflict detection. We report on the analysis of the data collected in the user study, and provide an in-depth discussion on the findings derived from it.