Should We Replace Our Merge Tools?

While unstructured merge tools try to automatically resolve merge conflicts via textual similarity, semistructured merge tools try to go further by partially exploiting the syntactic structure and semantics of the involved artefacts. Previous studies compare these merge approaches with respect to the number of reported conflicts, showing, for most projects and merge situations, a reduction in favor of semistructured merge. However, these studies do not investigate whether this reduction actually leads to integration effort reduction (Productivity) without negative impact on the correctness of the merging process (Quality). To analyze this, and to better understand how these tools could be improved, we propose empirical studies to identify spurious conflicts reported by one approach but not by the other, and interference reported as conflict by one approach but missed by the other.