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

Abstract

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 increases 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.