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

by Gousios, Georgios and Zaidman, Andy and Storey, Margaret-Anne and van Deursen, Arie

You can get a pre-print version from here.
You can view the publisher's page here.
See the paper's associated code repository: gousiosg/pullreqs-integrators

Abstract

In the pull-based development model, the integrator has the crucial role of managing and integrating contributions. This work focuses on the role of the integrator and investigates working habits and challenges alike. We set up an exploratory qualitative study involving a large-scale survey of 749 integrators, to which we add quantitative data from the integrator’s project. Our results provide insights into the factors they consider in their decision making process to accept or reject a contribution. Our key findings are that integrators struggle to maintain the quality of their projects and have difficulties with prioritizing contributions that are to be merged. Our insights have implications for practitioners who wish to use or improve their pull-based development process, as well as for researchers striving to understand the theoretical implications of the pull-based model in software development.

Bibtex record

@inproceedings{GZSD15,
  author = {Gousios, Georgios and Zaidman, Andy and Storey, Margaret-Anne and van Deursen, Arie},
  title = {Work Practices and Challenges in Pull-Based Development: The
                   Integrator's Perspective},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering},
  series = {ICSE},
  year = {2015},
  month = may,
  volume = {1},
  pages = {358-368},
  location = {Florence, Italy},
  doi = {10.1109/ICSE.2015.55},
  url = {/pub/pullreqs-integrators.pdf},
  github = {gousiosg/pullreqs-integrators},
  speakerdeck = {e340d9f98bd0426abada24888cf6f32d}
}

Presentation

The paper