Abstract As the predominant modern version control system, Git has become an indispensable tool for both commercial and open‐source software projects. It substantially improves software development effectiveness and efficiency through its distributed version control system, fostering seamless collaboration among teams and across locations. However, research has found that many developers have doubts about using Git commands, while the official Git documentation is rather scanty, that is, lacking sufficient explanations and examples. To help developers learn and use Git commands, we propose the first approach (Richen) for enriching Git documentation with usage examples and scenarios by leveraging crowd knowledge from Stack Overflow. Richen retrieves Git‐related posts from Stack Overflow, extracts relevant Q&A pairs, and selects representative command usages, including usage examples and scenarios, for different Git commands. Experimental results have shown that Richen can extract informative and concise command usages for Git commands. Compared with alternative methods adapted from API usage mining, the command usages obtained by Richen have significant advantages in terms of relevance, readability, and usability. Furthermore, we have shown through an empirical study that the command usages extracted by Richen can better help developers complete Git command‐related tasks.

In the realm of collaborative software development, version control systems (VCS) like Git play an indispensable role, enabling concurrent development and facilitating seamless integration of disparate code contributions. Despite these benefits, merge conflicts resulting from simultaneous changes to identical code lines often pose significant challenges to the integration process. Addressing this challenge, our paper introduces a novel two-stage approach, termed as CHATMERGE, for resolving Git merge conflicts. CHATMERGE pioneers a unique strategy that employs machine learning to initially predict resolution strategies, and subsequently leverages a large language model, ChatGPT, to create resolutions for conflicts that necessitate complex resolution strategies. A series of comprehensive experiments validate CHATMERGE’s efficacy, demonstrating its impressive alignment with historical manual resolutions and its superior performance relative to existing, publicly accessible tools. The paper further explores the influence of various classification algorithms and the prompt construction process for ChatGPT, providing further insights into the merge conflict resolution process. Moreover, to foster continued advancements in this area, CHATMERGE, along with its associated training and testing datasets, is made publicly available, offering a valuable resource for both developers and researchers. This work, therefore, provides both an innovative solution to merge conflict resolution and a strong foundation for future explorations in this domain.

Stack Overflow is a Q&A website that is popular among developers and extensively used in software engineering (SE) research. A significant body of research has examined how Stack Overflow can assist with software development tasks, such as recommending APIs. However, while researchers have recognized the importance of Stack Overflow in SE research related to software development tasks, the specific ways in which it is utilized and the reasons for its widespread usage in research have not been thoroughly explored. To address these knowledge gaps, we conducted the first study to understand the role of Stack Overflow in assisting with SE research regarding software development tasks by systematically examining relevant and high-quality research works. Meanwhile, we carried out a qualitative survey to gain insight into why researchers choose to utilize Stack Overflow in SE research and to solicit suggestions for the better use of Stack Overflow in research. The study identifies trends in the research area, prominent researchers and organizations, and the types of tasks that utilize Stack Overflow in research, with coding and debugging being the most common. Moreover, it examines how Stack Overflow data is utilized in SE research regarding software development tasks, including searching, training models, and mining associations. Our qualitative survey of researchers indicates that the popularity of Stack Overflow stems from its comprehensive explanations of technical topics that are often not found in documentation or manuals. The findings provide a comprehensive understanding of the role of Stack Overflow in SE research regarding software development tasks, and offer actionable implications for both researchers and stakeholders of Stack Overflow to facilitate future research and improvements.