Automatically Prioritizing Pull Requests

by van der Veen, Erik and Gousios, Georgios and Zaidman, Andy

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Abstract

In previous work, we observed that in the pull-based development model integrators face challenges with regard to prioritizing work in the face of multiple concurrent pull requests. We present the design and initial implementation of a prototype pull request prioritisation tool called PRioritizer. PRioritizer works like a priority inbox for pull requests, recommending the top pull requests the project owner should focus on. A preliminary user study showed that PRioritizer provides functionality that GitHub is currently lacking, even though users need more insight into how the priority ranking is established to make PRioritizer really useful.

Bibtex record

@inproceedings{VGZ15,
  author = {van der Veen, Erik and Gousios, Georgios and Zaidman, Andy},
  title = {Automatically Prioritizing Pull Requests},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE/ACM 12th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)},
  year = {2015},
  month = may,
  location = {Florence, Italy},
  doi = {10.1109/MSR.2015.40},
  pages = {357-361},
  url = {/pub/prioritizer.pdf},
  github = {PRioritizer/PRioritizer-paper}
}

The paper