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...

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Published in:Proceedings / International Conference on Software Engineering pp. 285 - 296
Main Authors: Gousios, Georgios, Storey, Margaret-Anne, Bacchelli, Alberto
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: ACM 01.05.2016
Subjects:
Collaboration
dis- tributed software development
Electronic mail
Encoding
Face
Focusing
GitHub
open source contribution
pull request
pull-based development
Software
Software engineering
ISSN:1558-1225
Online Access:Get full text
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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.
AbstractList 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.
Author Bacchelli, Alberto
Gousios, Georgios
Storey, Margaret-Anne
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  givenname: Margaret-Anne
  surname: Storey
  fullname: Storey, Margaret-Anne
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  givenname: Alberto
  surname: Bacchelli
  fullname: Bacchelli, Alberto
  email: a.bacchelli@tudelft.nl
  organization: Delft Univ. of Technol., Delft, Netherlands
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StartPage 285
SubjectTerms Collaboration
dis- tributed software development
Electronic mail
Encoding
Face
Focusing
GitHub
open source contribution
pull request
pull-based development
Software
Software engineering
Title Work Practices and Challenges in Pull-Based Development: The Contributor's Perspective
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