Collaborative software development is an integral part of the modern software development life cycle, essential to the success of large-scale software projects. When multiple developers make concurrent changes around the same lines of code, a merge conflict may occur. Such conflicts stall pull requests and continuous integration pipelines for hours to several days, seriously hurting developer productivity. To address this problem, we introduce MergeBERT, a novel neural program merge framework based on token-level three-way differencing and a transformer encoder model. By exploiting the restricted nature of merge conflict resolutions, we reformulate the task of generating the resolution sequence as a classification task over a set of primitive merge patterns extracted from real-world merge commit data. Our model achieves 63\u201368% accuracy for merge resolution synthesis, yielding nearly a 3\u00d7 performance improvement over existing semi-structured, and 2\u00d7 improvement over neural program merge tools. Finally, we demonstrate that MergeBERT is sufficiently flexible to work with source code files in Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and C# programming languages. To measure the practical use of MergeBERT, we conduct a user study to evaluate MergeBERT suggestions with 25 developers from large OSS projects on 122 real-world conflicts they encountered. Results suggest that in practice, MergeBERT resolutions would be accepted at a higher rate than estimated by automatic metrics for precision and accuracy. Additionally, we use participant feedback to identify future avenues for improvement of MergeBERT.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Collaborative software development is an integral part of the modern software development life cycle, essential to the success of large-scale software projects. When multiple developers make concurrent changes around the same lines of code, a merge conflict may occur. Such conflicts stall pull requests and continuous integration pipelines for hours to several days, seriously hurting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"msr-content-type":[3],"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13560],"msr-publication-type":[193716],"msr-product-type":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-platform":[],"msr-download-source":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-field-of-study":[249202],"msr-conference":[259201],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-879978","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-programming-languages-software-engineering","msr-locale-en_us","msr-field-of-study-programming-language"],"msr_publishername":"ACM","msr_edition":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2022-11-1","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"","msr_number":"","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":1,"msr_main_download":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"file","viewUrl":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2022\/09\/mergebert-fse22-camera-ready.pdf","id":"879981","title":"mergebert-fse22-camera-ready","label_id":"243109","label":0}],"msr_related_uploader":"","msr_attachments":[{"id":879981,"url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2022\/09\/mergebert-fse22-camera-ready.pdf"}],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Alexey Svyatkovskiy","user_id":40672,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Alexey Svyatkovskiy"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Sarah Fakhoury","user_id":42180,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Sarah Fakhoury"},{"type":"text","value":"Negar Ghorbani","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"text","value":"Todd Mytkowicz","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Christian Bird","user_id":31346,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Christian Bird"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Jinu Jang","user_id":41560,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Jinu Jang"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Neel Sundaresan","user_id":40798,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Neel Sundaresan"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Shuvendu Lahiri","user_id":33640,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Shuvendu Lahiri"},{"type":"text","value":"Elizabeth Dinella","user_id":0,"rest_url":false}],"msr_impact_theme":[],"msr_research_lab":[199565],"msr_event":[],"msr_group":[144812,144860],"msr_project":[890049,879960],"publication":[],"video":[],"download":[],"msr_publication_type":"inproceedings","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/879978"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-research-item"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/879978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":913545,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/879978\/revisions\/913545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=879978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-content-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-content-type?post=879978"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-highlight","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-highlight?post=879978"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=879978"},{"taxonomy":"msr-publication-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-publication-type?post=879978"},{"taxonomy":"msr-product-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-product-type?post=879978"},{"taxonomy":"msr-focus-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-focus-area?post=879978"},{"taxonomy":"msr-platform","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-platform?post=879978"},{"taxonomy":"msr-download-source","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-download-source?post=879978"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=879978"},{"taxonomy":"msr-field-of-study","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-field-of-study?post=879978"},{"taxonomy":"msr-conference","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-conference?post=879978"},{"taxonomy":"msr-journal","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-journal?post=879978"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=879978"},{"taxonomy":"msr-pillar","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-pillar?post=879978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}