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,"_classifai_error":"","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-post-option":[],"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\/wp-content\/uploads\/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\/wp-content\/uploads\/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","related_content":{"projects":[{"ID":890049,"post_title":"Trusted AI-assisted Programming","post_name":"trusted-ai-assisted-programming","post_type":"msr-project","post_date":"2022-11-17 11:25:36","post_modified":"2024-10-23 15:47:00","post_status":"publish","permalink":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/trusted-ai-assisted-programming\/","post_excerpt":"Machine learning, in particular Large Language Models, has shown great promise at automating several aspects of programming and software development such as coding, testing, integration, static analysis, verification etc. in recent years. 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