research-article

Branching and merging: an investigation into current version control practices

Authors:

Shaun Phillips,

Jonathan Sillito,

Rob WalkerAuthors Info & Claims

CHASE '11: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering

Pages 9 - 15

https://doi.org/10.1145/1984642.1984645

Published: 21 May 2011 Publication History

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Abstract

The use of version control has become ubiquitous in software development projects. Version control systems facilitate parallel development and maintenance through branching, the creation of isolated codelines. Merging is a consequence of branching and is the process of integrating codelines. However, there are unanswered questions about the use of version control to support parallel development; in particular, how are branching and merging used in practice? What defines a successful branching and merging strategy? As a first step towards answering these questions, we recruited a diverse sample of 140 version control users to participate in an online survey. In this paper, we present the survey results and 4 key observations about branching and merging practices in software development projects.

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Cited By

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Manesh DBowman Jr. DLee S(2024)SHARP: Exploring Version Control Systems in Live Coding MusicProceedings of the 16th Conference on Creativity & Cognition10.1145/3635636.3656195(426-437)Online publication date: 23-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3635636.3656195
Asuzu CCheng KOlechowski A(2024)The Personas of Cloud CAD Collaboration: A Case Study of a Team of CAD ProfessionalsIEEE Transactions on Engineering Management10.1109/TEM.2024.340917871(11225-11237)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TEM.2024.3409178
Saurabh SKumar D(2024)Model to reduce DevOps pipeline execution time using SASTInternational Journal of System Assurance Engineering and Management10.1007/s13198-024-02262-615:5(1999-2009)Online publication date: 30-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13198-024-02262-6
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Index Terms

Branching and merging: an investigation into current version control practices
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Designing software
      1. Requirements analysis

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Published In

CHASE '11: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering

May 2011

100 pages

ISBN:9781450305761

DOI:10.1145/1984642

Program Chairs:
Marcelo Cataldo
Robert Bosch Corporate Research, USA
,
Cleidson de Souza
IBM Research - Brazil, Brazil
,
Yvonne Dittrich
IT University of Copenhagan, Denmark
,
Rashina Hoda
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
,
Helen Sharp
Open University, UK

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 May 2011

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ICSE11

Sponsor:

SIGSOFT

ICSE11: International Conference on Software Engineering

May 21, 2011

HI, Waikiki, Honolulu, USA

Acceptance Rates

CHASE '11 Paper Acceptance Rate 19 of 36 submissions, 53%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 47 of 70 submissions, 67%

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Cited By

View all

Manesh DBowman Jr. DLee S(2024)SHARP: Exploring Version Control Systems in Live Coding MusicProceedings of the 16th Conference on Creativity & Cognition10.1145/3635636.3656195(426-437)Online publication date: 23-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3635636.3656195
Asuzu CCheng KOlechowski A(2024)The Personas of Cloud CAD Collaboration: A Case Study of a Team of CAD ProfessionalsIEEE Transactions on Engineering Management10.1109/TEM.2024.340917871(11225-11237)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TEM.2024.3409178
Saurabh SKumar D(2024)Model to reduce DevOps pipeline execution time using SASTInternational Journal of System Assurance Engineering and Management10.1007/s13198-024-02262-615:5(1999-2009)Online publication date: 30-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13198-024-02262-6
Cheng KCuvin POlechowski AZhou S(2023)User Perspectives on Branching in Computer-Aided DesignProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36102207:CSCW2(1-30)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610220
Ellis MNadi SDig D(2023)Operation-Based Refactoring-Aware Merging: An Empirical EvaluationIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2022.322885149:4(2698-2721)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2022.3228851
Muylaert WHärtel JDe Roover C(2023)Symbolic Execution to Detect Semantic Merge Conflicts2023 IEEE 23rd International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM)10.1109/SCAM59687.2023.00028(186-197)Online publication date: 2-Oct-2023
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Elias PCampos HOgasawara EMurta L(2023)Towards accurate recommendations of merge conflicts resolution strategiesInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2023.107332164(107332)Online publication date: Dec-2023
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Riquet NDevroey XVanderose BLo DMcIntosh SNovielli N(2022)GitDelver enterprise dataset (GDED)Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/3524842.3528003(403-407)Online publication date: 23-May-2022
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Prutchi Ede S. Campos Junior HMurta L(2021)How the adoption of feature toggles correlates with branch merges and defects in open‐source projects?Software: Practice and Experience10.1002/spe.303452:2(506-536)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2021
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Junior DPereira RSantos CBento Villela MGasparini IUchôa Conte T(2020)A conceptual scheme to support the identification of consolidation requirements in open designProceedings of the 19th Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3424953.3426625(1-10)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2020
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