While the creation of new branches and forks is easy and fast with modern version-control systems, merging is often time-consuming. Especially when dealing with many branches or forks, a prediction of merge costs based on lightweight indicators would be desirable to help developers recognize problematic merging scenarios before potential conflicts become too severe in the evolution of a complex software project. We analyze the predictive power of several indicators, such as the number, size or scattering degree of commits in each branch, derived either from the version-control system or directly from the source code. Based on a survey of 41 developers, we inferred 7 potential indicators to predict the number of merge conflicts. We tested corresponding hypotheses by studying 163 open-source projects, including 21,488 merge scenarios and comprising 49,449,773 lines of code. A notable (negative) result is that none of the 7 indicators suggested by the participants of the developer survey has a predictive power concerning the frequency of merge conflicts. We discuss this and other findings as well as perspectives thereof.

中文翻译：

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野外合并冲突的指标：调查和实证研究

虽然使用现代版本控制系统可以轻松快速地创建新的分支和分支，但合并通常很耗时。特别是在处理许多分支或分支时，基于轻量级指标的合并成本预测将有助于开发人员在复杂软件项目的演变中潜在冲突变得过于严重之前识别有问题的合并场景。我们分析了几个指标的预测能力，例如每个分支中提交的数量、大小或分散程度，这些指标来自版本控制系统或直接来自源代码。根据对 41 位开发人员的调查，我们推断出 7 个潜在指标来预测合并冲突的数量。我们通过研究 163 个开源项目，包括 21 个，488 个合并场景，包含 49,449,773 行代码。一个值得注意的（负面）结果是，开发商调查的参与者建议的 7 个指标中没有一个具有关于合并冲突频率的预测能力。我们讨论了这一发现和其他发现及其观点。