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Contribution Details

Type Conference or Workshop Paper
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Published in Proceedings Yes
Title Work practices and challenges in pull-based development the contributor's perspective
Organization Unit
  • Contribution from another University/Organization than University of Zurich
Authors
  • Georgios Gousios
  • Margaret-Anne Storey
  • Alberto Bacchelli
Presentation Type paper
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
ISBN 9781450339001
Page Range 285 - 296
Event Title 38th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)
Event Type conference
Event Location Austin, Texas
Event Start Date June 14 - 2016
Event End Date June 22 - 2016
Series Name Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering Companion
Place of Publication New York, New York, USA
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Abstract Text 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.
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Digital Object Identifier 10.1145/2884781.2884826
Other Identification Number merlin-id:16636
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