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

Georgios Gousios, Margaret Anne Storey, Alberto Bacchelli

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

192 Citations (Scopus)
370 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

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 challenges they face. We conducted a survey with 645 top contributors to active OSS projects using the pull-based model on GitHub, the prevalent social coding site. We also analyzed traces extracted from corresponding GitHub repositories. Our research shows that: contributors have a strong interest in maintaining awareness of project status to get inspiration and avoid duplicating work, but they do not actively propagate information; communication within pull requests is reportedly limited to low-level concerns and contributors often use communication channels external to pull requests; challenges are mostly social in nature, with most reporting poor responsiveness from integrators; and the increased transparency of this setting is a confirmed motivation to contribute. Based on these findings, we present recommendations for practitioners to streamline the contribution process and discuss potential future research directions.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2016 IEEE/ACM 38th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering Companion, ICSE 2016
Place of PublicationLos Alamitos, CA
PublisherIEEE Computer Press
Pages285-296
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-4503-3900-1
ISBN (Print)978-1-4503-4205-6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 14 May 2016
Event2016 IEEE/ACM 38th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2016 - Austin, United States
Duration: 14 May 201622 May 2016

Conference

Conference2016 IEEE/ACM 38th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2016
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityAustin
Period14/05/1622/05/16

Keywords

  • Distributed software development
  • GitHub
  • Open source contribution
  • Pull request
  • Pull-based development

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