Detecting, Understanding and Resolving Build and Test Conflicts

Collaborative software development allows developers to contribute to the same project simultaneously performing different activities. Although this might increase development productivity, it also brings conflicts among developers contributions. Different kinds of conflicts can arise, but previous studies have often focused on merge conflicts. So we aim to further investigate build and test conflicts occurrence, that are conflicts revealed by failures when building and testing integrated code, respectively. For that, we intend to study the causes of build and test conflicts, their adopted resolution patterns, and the factors that are associated with the conflict occurrence. Based on these results, we plan to develop a tool for helping developers when resolving build and test conflicts. Our initial results, analyzing Java projects, show that most build conflicts are caused by missing declarations removed or renamed by one developer but referenced by the changes of another developer. We also verified these conflicts are often resolved by removing the dangling reference. Based on such finding, we developed a prototype that recommends fixes for these build conflicts.