An exploratory study of the pull-based software development model
Year: 2014
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: 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.
Institutions: Delft University of Technology, University of Klagenfurt
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Science Applications
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2139092060