TIPMerge: recommending experts for integrating changes across branches

Abstract

Parallel development in branches is a common software practice. However, past work has found that integration of changes across branches is not easy, and often leads to failures. Thus far, there has been little work to recommend developers who have the right expertise to perform a branch integration. We propose TIPMerge, a novel tool that recommends developers who are best suited to perform merges, by taking into consideration developers’ past experience in the project, their changes in the branches, and de-pendencies among modified files in the branches. We evaluated TIPMerge on 28 projects, which included up to 15,584 merges with at least two developers, and potentially conflicting changes. On average, 85% of the top-3 recommendations by TIPMerge correctly included the developer who performed the merge. Best (accuracy) results of recommendations were at 98%. Our inter-views with developers of two projects reveal that in cases where the TIPMerge recommendation did not match the actual merge developer, the recommended developer had the expertise to per-form the merge, or was involved in a collaborative merge session.