A State-of-the-Art Survey on Software Merging

By Tom Mens. IEEE Trans. Software Eng., 2002

625 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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Difference and Union of Models (2003, background): “It remains to be investigated if the above mechanism is feasible, or if a merging algorithm is required which would consider more differences in parallel [3] [8].”
Palantir: raising awareness among configuration management workspaces (2003, background): “Conflicts may then arise, but semi-automated differencing and merging tools help in identifying and resolving them (albeit only a subset [26]).”
Feature-Oriented Software Product Lines (2013, methodology): “In practice, merges are mostly performed in a line-based fashion using textual patches, and only when there is a conflict (that is when different changes are applied to the same line) manual intervention is necessary (Mens 2002).”
Change Distilling:Tree Differencing for Fine-Grained Source Code Change Extraction (2007, background): “Mens has conducted a survey on existing software merging techniques in [28].”
Differential symbolic execution (2008, background): “For example, information about the differences between versions is useful for version merging, producing program documentation, and computing change metrics [33, 47, 59].”
Collaboration in Software Engineering: A Roadmap (2007, neutral): “Many SCM system permit parallel work on artifacts, in which multiple engineers edit the same artifact at the same time, using merge tools to resolve inconsistencies [49].”