Automatic Software Merging using Automated Program Repair

Resolution of merge conflicts is inevitable in con-current software development where source code has been independently modified by multiple programmers. Unfortunately, it requires a lot of human efforts since programmers have to change the conflicting code until the merged code can be compiled with no error and does the correct behavior expected by themselves. Although several techniques have been proposed to (semi-)automatically resolve textual, syntactic, and semantic merge conflicts, behavioral conflicts are still a big trouble for modern software development using version control systems. In this paper, we propose an automatic merge mechanism that reduces programmers’ burden to resolve behavioral merge conflicts, by exploiting an automated program repair (APR) technique that fully-automatically fixes faults (the unexpected behavior) exposed by tests. To make the automatic merge mechanism feasible, it produces initial programs to be fixed by combining class members within the code to be merged. Moreover, it aggressively takes in code fragments within programs to be merged into the ingredient space. Our experimental results successfully demonstrate that an APR technique can solve behavioral conflicts with no intervention of human.