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...

ConE: A Concurrent Edit Detection Tool for Large Scale Software Development

Modern, complex software systems are being continuously extended and adjusted. The developers responsible for this may come from different teams or organizations, and may be distributed over the world. This may make it difficult to keep track of what other developers are doing, which may result in multiple developers concurrently editing the...

Method-Level Data in GitHub Pull Request Descriptions: Effects on Developers' Prioritization and Facilitation of Fixing Vulnerable Dependencies

Modern software development involves the usage of external third-party software projects as direct dependencies. Nonetheless, developers of a dependant project have no control over critical aspects such as development and testing of the dependency. This can put the reliant repositories at risk through vulnerabilities, which can be exploited by...

Exploration of the code review process:: Can a code review checklist improve the process?

In the software engineering field the code review process has been widely adopted as a quality control, in the current day code reviews have also multiple additional advantages. In this research we explored how the code review process is used at Greenchoice, a Dutch energy supplier. Subsequently, we created a code review checklist which was used...

Relationship between Geographical Location and Evaluation of Developer Contributions in GitHub

Background: Open source software projects show gender bias suggesting that other demographic characteristics of developers, like geographical location, can negatively influence evaluation of contributions too. Aim: This study contributes to this emerging body of knowledge in software development by presenting a quantitative analysis of the...

A Case for Deep Learning in Mining Software Repositories

Repository mining researchers have successfully applied machine learning in a variety of<br/>scenarios.  However, the use of deep learning in repository mining tasks is still in its infancy.<br/>In this thesis, we describe the advantages and disadvantages of using deep learning in mining software repository research and demonstrate these by...

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...

Octopull: Integrating Static Analysis with Code Reviews

Teams using modern day software engineering practices often incorporate code reviews as a quality assurance step in their development. These code reviews are intended to uncover software quality defects before code changes are incorporated into the project. Certain classes of these software quality defects can be detected by so-called static...

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...

Prioritizing pull requests

Previous work showed that in the pull-based development model integrators face challenges with regard to prioritizing work in the face of multiple concurrent pull requests. We identified the manual prioritization heuristics applied by integrators and extracted features from these heuristics. The features are used to train a machine learning...

Combining source code and test coverage changes in pull requests

With the increasing popularity of open-source version control platforms like GitHub, developers get more feedback on the changes they make. A common tool in version control systems is the highlighted difference view of the source code. This enables reviewers to quickly view the changes made. A missing feature is comparison of the test coverage....

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...