Almost Rerere: An Approach for Automating Conflict Resolution from Similar Resolved Conflicts

Concurrent development requires the ability of reconciling conflicting updates to the code made independently. A specific case occurs when long living feature branches are integrated to a rapid changing code base. In this scenario, every integration test will require to manually resolve the same conflicts at every iteration. In this paper we propose a framework for automating the detection and resolution of conflicts in the code updated by distinct developers, one of which may be a code generator. The tool learns how to solve conflicts from past experience and applies resolutions, encoded as replacement regular expressions, to conflicts not seen before. Experiments show that the number of automatically resolved conflicts and the quality of the solution increase as the system acquires experience.