Determinants of pull-based development in the context of continuous integration

Yue Yu, Gang Yin, Tao Wang, Cheng Yang, Huaimin Wang
2016 Science China Information Sciences  
The pull-based development model, widely used in distributed software teams on open source communities, can efficiently gather the wisdom from crowds. Instead of sharing access to a central repository, contributors create a fork, update it locally, and request to have their changes merged back, i.e., submit a pull-request. On the one hand, this model lowers the barrier to entry for potential contributors since anyone can submit pull-requests to any repository, but on the other hand it also
more » ... ases the burden on integrators, who are responsible for assessing the proposed patches and integrating the suitable changes into the central repository. The role of integrators in pull-based development is crucial. They must not only ensure that pull-requests should meet the project's quality standards before being accepted, but also finish the evaluations in a timely manner. To keep up with the volume of incoming pull-requests, continuous integration (CI) is widely adopted to automatically build and test every pull-request at the time of submission. CI provides extra evidences relating to the quality of pull-requests, which would help integrators to make final decision (i.e., accept or reject). In this paper, we present a quantitative study that tries to discover which factors affect the process of pull-based development model, including acceptance and latency in the context of CI. Using regression modeling on data extracted from a sample of GitHub projects deploying the Travis-CI service, we find that the evaluation process is a complex issue, requiring many independent variables to explain adequately. In particular, CI is a dominant factor for the process, which not only has a great influence on the evaluation process per se, but also changes the effects of some traditional predictors.
doi:10.1007/s11432-016-5595-8 fatcat:tqemqyzs7jel3h7wc3lb24jrbi