Pull Request Decisions Explained: An Empirical Overview

Context: The pull-based development model is widely used in open source projects, leading to the emergence of trends in distributed software development. One aspect that has garnered significant attention concerning pull request decisions is the identification of explanatory factors. Objective: This study builds on a decade of research on...

The effects of change decomposition on code review—a controlled experiment

Background: Code review is a cognitively demanding and time-consuming process. Previous qualitative studies hinted at how decomposing change sets into multiple yet internally coherent ones would improve the reviewing process. So far, literature provided no quantitative analysis of this hypothesis.<br/>Aims: (1) Quantitatively measure the effects...

Work Practices and Challenges in Pull-Based Development: The Contributor’s Perspective

The pull-based development model is an emerging way of contributing to distributed software projects that is gaining enormous popularity within the open source software (OSS) world. Previous work has examined this model by focusing on projects and their owners-we complement it by examining the work practices of project contributors and the...

Automatically prioritizing pull requests

In previous work, we observed that in the pull-based development model integrators face challenges with regard to prioritizing work in the face of multiple concurrent pull requests. We present the design and initial implementation of a prototype pull request prioritisation tool called PRioritizer. PRioritizer works like a priority inbox for...

An Exploratory Study of the Pull-based Software Development Model

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...