Resolving merge conflicts manually is a tedious and complex task. While automated approaches exist, many challenges persist. One promising yet underexplored solution is the use of search-based optimization algorithms, which require an evaluation function to measure the quality of intermediary solutions. However, using code compilation and test execution for this purpose is computationally expensive. This study investigates the relationship between conflict resolutions and conflicting content to identify a metric for guiding search-based optimization techniques. We analyzed 9,998 conflict chunks from 1,062 open source projects, focusing on the similarity of resolutions to their parents and the correlation between randomly generated candidates, parent versions, and the resolution. Our findings reveal that conflict resolutions are, on average, 70% similar to both parents. A strong median correlation ( \(\rho=0.791\) ) exists between candidate-parent and candidate-resolution similarities when aggregating parent similarities with the mean function. Based on these findings, we propose and evaluate SBCR, a Search-Based Conflict Resolution approach that uses parent similarity as a guiding function. We found that the resolution candidates generated by SBCR have a median of 86.5% similarity to the expected resolution, achieving 100% of similarity in 25.2% of the conflicts.

Abstract Context Branching has been widely adopted in version control to enable collaborative software development. However, the isolation caused by branches may impose challenges on the upcoming merging process. Recently, companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Spotify, among others, have adopted trunk‐based development together with feature toggles. This strategy enables collaboration without the need for isolation through branches, potentially reducing the merging challenges. However, the literature lacks evidence about the benefits and limitations of feature toggles to collaborative software development. Objective/method In this article, we study the effects of applying feature toggles on 949 open‐source projects written in six different programming languages. We first identified the moment in which each project adopted a feature toggles framework. Then, we observed whether the adoption implied significant changes in the frequency or complexity of branch merges and the number of defects, and the average time to fix them. Finally, we compared the obtained results with results obtained from a set of control projects that do not use feature toggles frameworks. Results/conclusion We could observe a reduction in the average merge effort and an increase in the average total time needed to fix defects after adopting feature toggles frameworks. However, we could not confirm that this increase was influenced by the use of feature toggles.