Supporting streams of changes during branch integration

When developing large applications, integrators face the problem of integrating changes between branches or forks. While version control systems provide support for merging changes, this support is mostly text-based, and does not take the program entities into account. Furthermore, there exists no support for assessing which other changes a particular change depends on have to be integrated. Consequently, integrators are left to perform a manual and tedious comparison of the changes within the sequence of their branch and to successfully integrate them.In this paper, we present an approach that analyzes changes within a sequence of changes (stream of changes): such analysis identifies and characterizes dependencies between the changes. The approach identifies changes as autonomous, only used by others, only using other changes, or both. Such a characterization aims at easing the integrator's work. In addition, the approach supports important queries that an integrator otherwise has to perform manually. We applied the approach to a stream of changes representing 5 years of development work on an open-source project and report our experiences.