Multi-reviewing pull-requests: An exploratory study on GitHub OSS projects

摘要

Context: GitHub has enabled developers to easily contribute their review comments on multiple pull-requests and switch their review focus between different pull-requests, Le., multi-reviewing. Reviewing multiple pull-requests simultaneously may enhance work efficiency. However, multi-reviewing also relies on developers' rationally allocating their focus, which may bring a different influence to the resolution of pull-requests.Objective: In this paper, we present an ongoing study of the impact of multi-reviewing on pull-request resolution in GitHub open source projects.Method: We collected and analyzed 1,836,280 pull-requests from 760 GitHub projects to explore how multi-reviewing affects the resolution of a pull-request.Results: We find that multi-reviewing is a common behavior in GitHub. However, more multi-reviewing behaviors tend to bring longer pull-request resolution latency.Conclusion: Multi-reviewing is a complex behavior of developers, and has an important impact on the efficiency of pull-request resolution. Our study motivates the need for more research on multi-reviewing.