  Merge conflicts created by software team members working on the same code can
be costly to resolve, and adversely affect productivity. In this work, we
suggest the approach of fine-grained merge conflict awareness, where software
team members are notified of potential merge conflicts via graphical decoration
of the relevant semantic elements, in near real-time. The novelty of this
approach is that it allows software developers to pinpoint the element in
conflict, such as a method's body, parameter, return value, and so on,
promoting communication about conflicting changes soon after they take place
and on a semantic level. We have also conducted a preliminary qualitative
evaluation of our approach, the results of which we report in this paper.
