On the Influence of Refactoring Types on Merge Effort

Abstract

Modern software development involves parallel work and concurrent changes, requiring code merging. Prior studies report that 10% to 20% of merge attempts result in conflicts, often requiring manual intervention. The literature explores factors that generate conflicts, including refactorings, but does not analyze how individual refactoring types influence the manual effort required to resolve them. We analyzed 64 open-source Java projects and applied association rule mining to measure the strength of associations between specific refactoring types and merge effort. Our results show that refactoring types relate to merge effort with varying strength. In particular, Rename Attribute, Move Class, Extract Variable, Change Return Type, and Split Parameter exhibit some of the strongest associations, especially when a higher number of such refactorings is present in the merge branches. We also find that both the number of refactorings and their diversity independently increase merge effort, both in terms of occurrence and intensity. Additionally, the co-occurrence of refactorings across parallel branches is associated with higher merge effort, particularly when combining structural transformations with changes to method signatures and data-structure representations, whereas more localized changes are less frequent in the most impactful combinations.