Effects of Adopting Code Review Bots on Pull Requests to OSS Projects

Wessel, Mairieli; Serebrenik, Alexander; Wiese, Igor; Steinmacher, Igor; Gerosa, Marco Aurélio

doi:10.1109/icsme46990.2020.00011

Cited by 53 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Implementing BreakBot as a bot allows us to fully automate the process and be as close as possible to the maintainers' usual development workflow. Because BreakBot feeds helpful information directly in GitHub's PRs, we expect it to enhance the code review process, as was shown for other bots in previous work [25].…”

Section: Breakbotmentioning

confidence: 91%

BreakBot: Analyzing the Impact of Breaking Changes to Assist Library Evolution

Ochoa,

Degueule,

Falleri

2021

Preprint

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If we make this change to our code, how will it impact our clients?" It is difficult for library maintainers to answer this simple-yet essential!question when evolving their libraries. Library maintainers are constantly balancing between two opposing positions: make changes at the risk of breaking some of their clients, or avoid changes and maintain compatibility at the cost of immobility and growing technical debt. We argue that the lack of objective usage data and tool support leaves maintainers with their own subjective perception of their community to make these decisions.We introduce BreakBot, a bot that analyses the pull requests of Java libraries on GitHub to identify the breaking changes they introduce and their impact on client projects. Through static analysis of libraries and clients, it extracts and summarizes objective data that enrich the code review process by providing maintainers with the appropriate information to decide whether-and how-changes should be accepted, directly in the pull requests.

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Section: Breakbotmentioning

confidence: 91%

BreakBot: Analyzing the Impact of Breaking Changes to Assist Library Evolution

Ochoa,

Degueule,

Falleri

2021

Preprint

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“…1) Aggregating project variables: We analyzed data from 6 months before and 6 months after the Action adoption. Similarly to previous work [5,6,14], we exclude 30 days around the Action adoption date to avoid the influence of the instability caused during this period. Afterward, we aggregated individual pull request data into monthly periods, considering 6 months before and after the Action introduction.…”

Section: Time Series Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…After applying all filters, our data set comprises 926 active projects that have been using at least one GitHub Action for 6 months. We focused on the same pull request related variables as in previous work [14]: Merged/non-merged pull requests: the number of monthly contributions (pull requests) that have been merged, or closed but not merged into the project, computed over all closed pull requests in each time frame. Comments on merged/non-merged pull requests: the median number of monthly comments computed over all merged and non-merged pull requests in each time frame.…”

Section: Time Series Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

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How Do Software Developers Use GitHub Actions to Automate Their Workflows?

Kinsman¹,

Wessel²,

Gerosa³

2021

Preprint

Self Cite

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Automated tools are frequently used in social coding repositories to perform repetitive activities that are part of the distributed software development process. Recently, GitHub introduced GitHub Actions, a feature providing automated workflows for repository maintainers. Although several Actions have been built and used by practitioners, relatively little has been done to evaluate them. Understanding and anticipating the effects of adopting such kind of technology is important for planning and management. Our research is the first to investigate how developers use Actions and how several activity indicators change after their adoption. Our results indicate that, although only a small subset of repositories adopted GitHub Actions to date, there is a positive perception of the technology. Our findings also indicate that the adoption of GitHub Actions increases the number of monthly rejected pull requests and decreases the monthly number of commits on merged pull requests. These results are especially relevant for practitioners to understand and prevent undesirable effects on their projects.

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“…The fact that 93 of the pull requests submitted by our students are merged by developers confirmed with this observation. In the future, it is worthwhile to study the effects of introducing code review bots for reviewing pull requests made by students [27].…”

Section: Project Requirementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

GitHub-OSS Fixit: Fixing Bugs at Scale in a Software Engineering Course

Tan

et al. 2021

2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training (ICSE-SEET)

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Many studies have shown the benefits of introducing open-source projects into teaching Software Engineering (SE) courses. However, there are several limitations of existing studies that limit the wide adaptation of open-source projects in a classroom setting, including (1) the selected project is limited to one particular project, (2) most studies only investigated on its effect on teaching a specific SE concept, and (3) students may make mistakes in their contribution which leads to poor quality code. Meanwhile, software companies have successfully launched programs like Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and FindBugs "fixit" to contribute to open-source projects. Inspired by the success of these programs, we propose GitHub-OSS Fixit, a teambased course project where students are taught to contribute to open-source Java projects by fixing bugs reported in GitHub. We described our course outline to teach students SE concepts by encouraging the usages of several automated program analysis tools. We also included the carefully designed instructions that we gave to students for participating in GitHub-OSS Fixit. As all lectures and labs are conducted online, we think that our course design could help in guiding future online SE courses. Overall, our survey results show that students think that GitHub-OSS Fixit could help them to improve many skills and apply the knowledge taught in class. In total, 154 students have submitted 214 pull requests to 24 different Java projects, in which 93 of them have been merged, and 46 have been closed by developers.

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Effects of Adopting Code Review Bots on Pull Requests to OSS Projects

Cited by 53 publications

References 32 publications

BreakBot: Analyzing the Impact of Breaking Changes to Assist Library Evolution

BreakBot: Analyzing the Impact of Breaking Changes to Assist Library Evolution

How Do Software Developers Use GitHub Actions to Automate Their Workflows?

GitHub-OSS Fixit: Fixing Bugs at Scale in a Software Engineering Course

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