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Who should make decision on this pull request? Analyzing time-decaying relationships and file similarities for integrator prediction
Journal of Systems and Software
  • Jing JIANG, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (Beihang University)
  • David LO, Singapore Management University
  • Jiateng ZHENG, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (Beihang University)
  • Xin XIA, Monash University
  • Yun YANG, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (Beihang University)
  • Li ZHANG, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (Beihang University)
Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
8-2019
Abstract

In pull-based development model, integrators are responsible for making decisions about whether to accept pull requests andintegrate code contributions. Ideally, pull requests are assigned to integrators and evaluated within a short time after their submissions. However, the volume of incoming pull requests is large in popular projects, and integrators often encounter difficulties inprocessing pull requests in a timely fashion. Therefore, an automatic integrator prediction approach is required to assign appropriate pull requests to integrators. In this paper, we propose an approach TRFPre which analyzes Time-decaying Relationships andFile similarities to predict integrators. We evaluate the effectiveness of TRFPre on 24 projects containing 138,373 pull requests.Experimental results show that TRFPre makes accurate integrator predictions in terms of accuracies and Mean Reciprocal Rank.Less than 2 predictions are needed to find correct integrator in 91.67% of projects. In comparison with state-of-the-art approachescHRev, WRC, TIE, CoreDevRec and ACRec, TRFPre improves top-1 accuracy by 68.2%, 73.9%, 49.3%, 14.3% and 46.4% onaverage across 24 projects.

Keywords
  • Integrator prediction,
  • Code review,
  • Open source,
  • GitHub
Identifier
10.1016/j.jss.2019.04.055
Publisher
Elsevier
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2019.04.055
Citation Information
Jing JIANG, David LO, Jiateng ZHENG, Xin XIA, et al.. "Who should make decision on this pull request? Analyzing time-decaying relationships and file similarities for integrator prediction" Journal of Systems and Software Vol. 154 (2019) p. 196 - 210 ISSN: 0164-1212
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/david_lo/359/