Evaluating the Branch Merging Effort in Version Control Systems

Abstract

It is common, in software development under version control, the need of parallel development of the source code via branches. Moreover, in most cases, the merge of these branches is necessary. Therefore, our work proposes the extraction of metrics that estimate the complexity to perform merges, making it possible to visualize, among all branches, which are the most critical and analyze the evolution of the metrics since the establishment of the branch. The evaluation of our work showed that some metrics behave better in order to estimate the complexity of integrating branches. For instance, the metric Number of Physical Conflicts reached up to 99% correlation when compared to the actual merge effort.