Software Integration Questions: A Quantitative Survey

Software is in constant evolution. In a software project, code changes represent bug fixes, enhancements, new features and adaptations due to changing domains. The evolution of a project codebase is usually managed in a revision control system that supports branches. Developers perform code changes in a branch and sometimes such changes are merged into other branch. This activity is called integration.Integration of changes poses substantial challenges. We conducted a survey to evaluate a catalogue of 46 questions about integration. For each question, the participants had to rank the importance and the support that current tools offer.In a period of 5 months we received the responses of 42 developers who integrate changes on very diverse software projects.