Pull Requests Acceptance: A Study Across Programming Languages

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This publication doesn't include Faculty of Economics and Administration. It includes Faculty of Informatics. Official publication website can be found on muni.cz.
Authors

KUHEJDA Ondřej ROSSI Bruno

Year of publication 2023
Type Article in Proceedings
Conference 49th Euromicro Conference Series on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA2023)
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Informatics

Citation
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/SEAA60479.2023.00064
Keywords Source Code quality; Mining software repositories; Pull requests; Static code analysis
Description Context: The pull-based development is a modern way to support distributed software development, helping to produce high-quality software with increased involvement from the software development community. Objectives: We investigate the effect of source code quality on Pull Request (PR) acceptance in different programming languages, looking at the quality flaws that can be more relevant. Method: We mine software repositories to analyze over 40K PRs from 100 open-source projects in five different programming languages: Python, Java, Kotlin, Haskell, and C/C++. The code quality of the individual PRs was evaluated using static code analysis. Quality flaws were inputted into classification models to predict PRs acceptance and evaluate the fitting. Results: There is a low impact of code quality on PRs acceptance. No major quality flaws can be used to predict reliably PRs acceptance. Conclusion: Source code quality plays a marginal role in accepting PRs in the analyzed projects. Additional factors might impact the acceptance of PRs, such as the reputation and popularity of the submitters.
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