Real-time collaborative resolving of merge conflicts

Merge conflicts are common especially in large and distributed software projects. There have been development to both make the conflicts less frequent by introducing better merge algorithms and to aid the user in resolving conflicts by better visualization and other means. However, one element lacking from the current conflict-resolving tools is the utilization of collective knowledge of project members, achievable through web-based collaboration. The person encountering the conflict may not have all the necessary information and understanding for resolving the conflict, in which case it would be beneficial to do the resolving collaboratively by all the parties who have been involved in causing the conflict or who otherwise have valuable information about the conflicted part of the project. In this paper, we present a process for real-time collaborative merging as well as a web-based tool supporting the process.