@inproceedings{1acda476f94d41be9a61b79de2992917,
title = "An Exploratory Study of the Pull-based Software Development Model",
abstract = "The advent of distributed version control systems has led to the development of a new paradigm for distributed software development; instead of pushing changes to a central repository, developers pull them from other repositories and merge them locally. Various code hosting sites, notably Github, have tapped on the opportunity to facilitate pull-based development by offering workflow support tools, such as code reviewing systems and integrated issue trackers. In this work, we explore how pull-based software development works, first on the GHTorrent corpus and then on a carefully selected sample of 291 projects. We find that the pull request model offers fast turnaround, increased opportunities for community engagement and decreased time to incorporate contributions. We show that a relatively small number of factors affect both the decision to merge a pull request and the time to process it. We also examine the reasons for pull request rejection and find that technical ones are only a small minority. ",
keywords = "Pull-based development, pull request, distributed software development, emperical software engineering",
author = "Georgios Gousios and Martin Pinzger and {van Deursen}, Arie",
year = "2014",
doi = "10.1145/2568225.2568260",
language = "English",
isbn = "978-1-4503-2756-5",
series = "ICSE 2014",
publisher = "Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)",
pages = "345--355",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering",
address = "United States",
note = "ICSE 2014, Hyderabad, India ; Conference date: 31-05-2014 Through 07-06-2014",
}