An Exploratory Study of the Pull-based Software Development Model

An Exploratory Study of the Pull-based Software Development Model

Gousios, G. (TU Delft Software Engineering)
Pinzger, M. (University of Klagenfurt)
van Deursen, A. (TU Delft Software Technology)

Software Technology

2014

The advent of distributed version control systems has led to the development of a new paradigm for distributed software development; instead of pushing changes to a central repository, developers pull them from other repositories and merge them locally. Various code hosting sites, notably Github, have tapped on the opportunity to facilitate pull-based development by offering workflow support tools, such as code reviewing systems and integrated issue trackers. In this work, we explore how pull-based software development works, first on the GHTorrent corpus and then on a carefully selected sample of 291 projects. We find that the pull request model offers fast turnaround, increased opportunities for community engagement and decreased time to incorporate contributions. We show that a relatively small number of factors affect both the decision to merge a pull request and the time to process it. We also examine the reasons for pull request rejection and find that technical ones are only a small minority.

Pull-based development
pull request
distributed software development
emperical software engineering

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:1acda476-f94d-41be-9a61-b79de2992917

https://doi.org/10.1145/2568225.2568260

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), New York, NY, USA

978-1-4503-2756-5

Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering

ICSE 2014, Hyderabad, India, 2014-05-31 → 2014-06-07, New York

ICSE 2014

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2014 G. Gousios, M. Pinzger, A. van Deursen