TIPMerge: recommending developers for merging branches

Abstract

Development in large projects often involves branches, where changes are performed in parallel and merged periodically. This merge process often combines two independent and long sequences of commits that may have been performed by multiple, different developers. It is nontrivial to identify the right developer to perform the merge, as the developer must have enough understanding of changes in both branches to ensure that the merged changes comply with the objective of both lines of work (branches), which may have been active for several months. We designed and developed TIPMerge, a novel tool that recommends developers who are best suited to perform the merge between two given branches. TIPMerge does so by taking into consideration developers’ past experience in the project, their changes in the branches, and the dependencies among modified files in the branches. In this paper we demonstrate TIPMerge over a real merge case from the Voldemort project.