EASE 2024
Tue 18 - Fri 21 June 2024 Salerno, Italy
Thu 20 Jun 2024 11:15 - 11:30 at Room Vietri - Mining Software Repositories Chair(s): Giuseppe Destefanis

In version control systems such as Git, concurrent modifications on the same artifacts can cause merge conflicts that may disrupt the development workflow by requiring manual intervention. While research on software merging focused on sophisticated techniques that hardly had any impact in practice, we present an empirical feasibility study on (semi-)automated conflict resolution using a fixed set of only a few language-agnostic conflict resolution patterns. In a large-scale quantitative analysis, we simulate the performance of our hypothetical conflict resolution strategy by classifying the merge conflict resolutions of a diverse sample of 10,000 GitHub projects according to these resolution patterns. We shed light on the derivability of merges on multiple levels of granularity: the conflicting merge commit, its conflicting files, and their individual conflicting chunks. While the derivability rates are promising, they substantially vary between the different levels of granularity. Interestingly, however, by inspecting potential factors affecting derivability, we observe that there are stronger correlations considering individual files than considering the entire merge. A short yet preliminary answer to whether (semi-)automated conflict resolution is easier than we expected is: yes, it might be, particularly if we use the right level of granularity for proposing conflict resolutions. Through our comprehensive analysis, we aspire to bridge the gap between academic innovations on sophisticated merge techniques and real-world merge conflict scenarios, laying the groundwork for more effective and widely accepted automatic merge tools.

Thu 20 Jun

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11:00 - 12:30
Mining Software RepositoriesResearch Papers / Journal-first at Room Vietri
Chair(s): Giuseppe Destefanis Brunel University London
11:00
15m
Talk
On the Accuracy of GitHub's Dependency Graph
Research Papers
Daniele Bifolco University of Sannio, Sabato Nocera Department of Computer Science, University of Salerno, Simone Romano University of Salerno, Massimiliano Di Penta University of Sannio, Italy, Rita Francese University of Salerno, Giuseppe Scanniello University of Salerno
11:15
15m
Talk
Towards Semi-Automated Merge Conflict Resolution: Is It Easier Than We Expected?Distinguished Paper Award
Research Papers
Alexander Boll University of Bern, Yael van Dok University of Bern, Manuel Ohrndorf University of Bern, Alexander Schultheiß Paderborn University, Timo Kehrer University of Bern
11:30
15m
Talk
Leveraging Statistical Machine Translation for Code Search
Research Papers
Hung Phan , Ali Jannesari Iowa State University
11:45
15m
Talk
LEGION: Harnessing Pre-trained Language Models for GitHub Topic Recommendations with Distribution-Balance Loss
Research Papers
Yen-Trang Dang Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Le-Cong Thanh The University of Melbourne, Phuc-Thanh Nguyen Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Anh M. T. Bui Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Phuong T. Nguyen University of L’Aquila, Xuan-Bach D. Le University of Melbourne, Quyet Thang Huynh Hanoi University of Science and Technology
Pre-print
12:00
15m
Talk
LLM-Based Chatbots for Mining Software Repositories: Challenges and Opportunities
Research Papers
Samuel Abedu Concordia University, Ahmad Abdellatif University of Calgary, Emad Shihab Concordia University
Pre-print
12:15
15m
Talk
An exploratory study of software artifacts on GitHub from the lens of documentation
Journal-first
Akhila Sri Manasa Venigalla IIT Tirupati, Sridhar Chimalakonda Indian Institute of Technology, Tirupati