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ICSE 2014

An exploratory study of the pull-based software development model

Georgios Gousios, Martin Pinzger, Arie van Deursen

Full textDOI 10.1145/2568225.2568260dblp

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.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{Gousios-al:ICSE14,
  author    = {Georgios Gousios and
               Martin Pinzger and
               Arie van Deursen},
  title     = {An exploratory study of the pull-based software development model},
  booktitle = {ICSE},
  pages     = {345--355},
  publisher = {{ACM}},
  year      = {2014},
}

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