Causes of merge conflicts

Abstract

Software branching and merging allows collaborative development and creating software variants, commonly referred to as clone & own. While simple and cheap, a trade-off is the need to merge code and to resolve merge conflicts, which frequently occur in practice. When resolving conflicts, a key challenge for developer is to understand the changes that led to the conflict. While merge conflicts and their characteristics are reasonably well understood, that is not the case for the actual changes that cause them.