Trends
The technological advancements in the 3-way merge method have led to the increase in popularity among software development environments to institute concurrent modification through branching in their practices of software configuration management (SCM). In the early to mid-1990s branching was a discouraged practice in smaller software development groups due to the complexities and conflicts introduced through the merging process and the low availability of cost-effective 3-way merge tools. However, this practice was more in demand among larger groups merely due to the increased likelihood that two developers would need to modify the same file at the same time. Merging, at that time, was indeed a challenge and in some environments, additional proprietary conventions were introduced to simplify the necessary merge.
In the early 2000s, the increased availability of reliable 3-way merge tools reduced the time that software development groups had to spend concerning themselves with the technical limitations of their infrastructure. Even smaller software groups are more inclined to approach concurrent modification in their revision control systems. Nevertheless, merges still often cause problems; even intelligent merge tools can't resolve all conflicts automatically. Consequently, human interaction is required, which can lead to human errors.
3-way merges still remain one of the more taxing tasks of any software development team. This is especially because the person resolving the merge needs prior knowledge of the original code, the intermediate commit and the changes wanted.
Read more about this topic: Merge (revision Control)
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