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Software Engineering vocabulary · Version Control

Three-way merge

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounCommon term

In software engineering, three-way merge means: A merge that compares two versions with a shared ancestor to identify and combine the changes made on each side.

In Turkish: üç yönlü birleştirme

How it is used

Used when branches have diverged. The third input is an ancestor version, not a third developer's branch.

Example sentences

  1. The three-way merge kept our new validation and their unrelated logging change.

    Comparing each side with the ancestor identifies independent edits.

  2. A three-way merge still required manual help because both branches rewrote the same condition.

    An ancestor helps detect a conflict but cannot always decide the intended result.

Common collocations

  • perform a three-way merge
  • three-way merge conflict
  • mergeTo combine the changes from one branch into another, so that both sets of work end up in the same code.
  • merge baseA best common ancestor of two commits, used by Git when calculating a three-way merge.

More terms: Version Control

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