An empirical study of the relationship between refactorings and merge conflicts in Javascript code
Pages 89 - 98
Abstract
Maintenance activities are crucial to prolong the lifecycle of a software. An important activity during software maintenance is refactoring, which is a transformation that improves the quality of a program without changing its behavior. During software development, Version Control Systems (VCS) are used to integrate changes made by developers. These integration procedures, known as merge processes, may result in conflicts if changes are made in the same place in the code. This work aims to analyze the possible relationship between refactorings and merge conflicts in JavaScript code. We analyzed 50 JavaScript repositories, including 56,966 merge scenarios, which 4,816 of them have conflicts. We discovered a moderate positive correlation between the number of conflicts and the number of refactoring transformations within the conflicting file. Additionally, this correlation captured a specific JavaScript refactoring type, "Internal Move", that was most strongly associated with conflicting merge scenarios.
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Index Terms
- An empirical study of the relationship between refactorings and merge conflicts in Javascript code
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Published In
September 2023
570 pages
ISBN:9798400707872
DOI:10.1145/3613372
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Published: 25 September 2023
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SBES 2023
SBES 2023: XXXVII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering
September 25 - 29, 2023
Campo Grande, Brazil
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