In our current setup the problem is more critical as development of two releases overlap with each other . We have a sprint cycle of 10 days where we have 5 days of active development after that code freeze is implemented & rest 5 days are only for big fixes. The next sprint starts just after the code freeze date of previous release. In ideal scenario this setup should work well but the biggest assumption behind successful execution of the process is their should be minimum code check-ins after code freeze & usually that doesn’t happens. This results in parallel development in 2 branches & therefore while merging two branches their are lot of code conflicts.
The real problem starts when we start merging code, as currently their are close to 100 developers working on the same code-base which means a huge list of files in conflict mode & you have to chase down each & every person to resolve those conflicts. To overcome the above-said problem we are planning to do 2 things.
First one is instead of doing merge after a long duration we are planning to increase the frequency of merge from once in 5 day to twice a day which would help us to reduce the list of conflicting files.
As I always strive to automate things as much as possible, the second part is to at-least create an automated tool that will perform a dummy merge of two branches and list out all the files that would result in conflict mode along with listing the last user’s who have modified the files in respective branch.
We are expecting 60-70% efficiency in code merge process, let’s see how things goes. Feel free to drop any ideas if you have or in case of any concerns :).
Although I tried to be as generic as possible, but just to let you know we are using Git as version control system.