Resolving Higher-Order Conflicts in Edit History Refactoring

Sammanfattning: When committing source code changes to a version control system, these changes might affect more than one of several tasks connected to the project. This can have a bad impact on analysis of changes. It can also make it difficult to reuse or undo previous changes, or difficult to understand the evolution of software. With edit history refactoring, the edit history of source code can be reconfigured to help the developer separate commits into smaller commits. Thereby, one can avoid commits that affect more than one task. However, separated commits can have unwanted effects on the source code. The aim of this thesis project is to resolve conflicts that may occur when refactoring an edit history. Changes have been made to Historef, a tool created by Saeki Laboratory at Tokyo Institute of Technology. This tool uses the technique of edit history refactoring. The changes help the tool evaluate possible edit history refactorings in order to suggest one that avoids source code con- flicts. By testing examples of edit histories, one can show that the tool can avoid different types of conflicts and the separated commits can be commited to a version control system without unwanted effects.