Recommending Participants for Collaborative Merge Sessions

Development of large projects often involves parallel work performed in multiple branches. Eventually, these branches need to be reintegrated through a merge operation. During merge, conflicts may arise and developers need to communicate to reach consensus about the desired resolution. For this reason, including the right developers to a collaborative merge session is fundamental. However, this task can be difficult especially when many different developers have made significant changes on each branch over a large number of files. In this paper, we present TIPMerge, an approach designed to recommend participants for collaborative merge sessions. TIPMerge analyzes the project history and builds a ranked list of developers who are the most appropriate to integrate a pair of branches (Developer Ranking) by considering developers’ changes in the branches, in the previous history, and in the dependencies among files across branches. Simply selecting the top developers in such a ranking is easy, but is not effective for collaborative merge sessions as the top developers may have overlapping knowledge. To support collaborative merge, TIPMerge employs optimization techniques to recommend developers with complementary knowledge (Team Recommendation) aiming to maximize joint knowledge coverage. Our results show a mean normalized improvement of 49.5% (median 50.4%) for the joint knowledge coverage with the optimization techniques for assembling teams of three developers for collaborative merge in comparison to choosing the top-3 developers in the ranked list.