ハシモト　マサトモ   Masatomo Hashimoto   橋本　政朋    所属   千葉工業大学  人工知能・ソフトウェア技術研究センター 人工知能・ソフトウェア技術研究センター    職種   主席研究員
言語種別	英語
発行・発表の年月	2025/11
形態種別	国際会議プロシーディングス
査読	査読あり
標題	On the Correctness of Software Merge
執筆形態	共著
掲載誌名	Proceedings of the 40th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
掲載区分	国外
担当区分	最終著者
著者・共著者	Akira Mori Masatomo Hashimoto
概要	In this paper, we present a new structural merge tool in comparison with existing tools based on the syntactic criteria we propose for evaluating the merge results. We require the merge result to be both parsable and universal. Being parsable means that the result is syntactically valid according to the grammar of the programming language. Being universal means that the result incorporates all and the only edit operations occurring in each branch while ensuring that edits common to both branches are applied only once. This requirement can be precisely defined using the notion of pushouts in category theory. In a large-scale experiment involving 43,774 file merge scenarios from 76 open-source Java projects, we found a number of incorrect results reported by the existing tools such as the Git companion merge tool, whereas our tool reports none. We expect that the proposed criterion will help in developing reliable merge tools in the future.