Industry widely uses unstructured merge tools that rely on textual analysis to detect and resolve conflicts between code contributions. Semistructured merge tools go further by partially exploring the syntactic structure of code artifacts, and, as a consequence, obtaining significant merge accuracy gains for Java-like languages. To understand whether semistructured merge and the observed gains generalize to other kinds of languages, we implement two semistructured merge tools for JavaScript, and compare them to an unstructured tool. We find that current semistructured merge algorithms and frameworks are not directly applicable for scripting languages like JavaScript. By adapting the algorithms, and studying 10,345 merge scenarios from 50 JavaScript projects on GitHub, we find evidence that our JavaScript tools report fewer spurious conflicts than unstructured merge, without compromising the correctness of the merging process. The gains, however, are much smaller than the ones observed for Java-like languages, suggesting that semistructured merge advantages might be limited for languages that allow both commutative and non-commutative declarations at the same syntactic level.

Context: Software development process is executed by professionals with different roles, who are responsible for distinct activities. These roles can have different degrees of autonomy depending on some factors, such as the adopted process and hierarchy. Goal: This study aims to identify what factors can impact autonomy and also investigate how autonomy is given to an employee based on two main factors: education level and professional experience. Methodology: Initially, a survey was carried out to understand how autonomy is perceived by 102 software engineers, as well as by 83 professionals from other areas. The next step was applying semi-structured interviews with software engineers to find a better understanding of the quantitative findings. Results: In general, education level and professional experience do not have an impact on autonomy. Only when autonomy is evaluated from the education level perspective, there is a significant difference among the respondents. During the interviews, we also could identify some topics that respondents mentioned which were related to autonomy. For example, the experience that software engineer has in a current project and the development process adopted by the company influence how autonomy is perceived. Conclusion: While professional qualification and experience are not directly related to autonomy, the lack of process and the amount of work experience on specific projects seem to be relevant factors to be aware of.