CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 15

Pull Request Governance in Open Source Communities

Alami, Adam, Pardo, Raul, Cohn, Marisa Leavitt, Wasowski, Andrzej·2022·IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
DOI 10.1109/tse.2021.3128356
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Pull requests facilitate inclusion and improvement of contributions in distributed software projects, especially in open source communities. An author makes a pull request to present a contribution as a candidate for inclusion in a code base. The request is inspected by maintainers and reviewers. The initiated process of review and collaborative improvement can be loaded with debates, opinions, and emotions. It heavily influences the atmosphere in the community. It can demotivate and detract contributors or it can fail to guard the code quality. Both problems put the existence of a community at risk. This mixed methods study aims to elucidate the mechanisms of evaluating pull requests in diverse open source software communities from the perspectives of developers and maintainers. We interviewed 30 participants from five different communities and conducted a survey with N=387 respondents. The data shows that acceptance of contributions in open source depends not only on technical criteria, but also significantly on social and strategic aspects. As a result, we identify three governance styles for pull requests: (1) protective, (2) equitable, and (3) lenient. While the protective style values trustworthiness and reliability of the contributor, the lenient style believes in creating a positive and welcoming environment where contributors are mentored to evolve contributions until the community standards are met. Each of the governance styles safeguards the quality of the project…

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1109/tse.2021.3128356

Cites

6 of 6 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • The inclusion criterion for GenAI governance was fixed before document analysis began and stayed stable throughout screening, not shaped by findings.

    “We fixed this inclusion criterion before document analysis began, building on prior definitions of OSS contribution governance [1, 11, 12]. The criterion stayed stable throughout screening; we only refined how it applied to borderline cases, so it was not shaped by our findings.”

    From To Ban or Not to Ban? How Open Source Projects Govern GenAI Contributions (2026) · cites this paper as [1]

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Alami, A., Pardo, R., Cohn, M. L., & Wasowski, A.
Affiliations
IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
ORCID
Alami, Adam
Venue
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Published
2022-12-01
Volume
48
Issue
12
Pages
4838-4856
ISSN
  • 0098-5589
  • 1939-3520
  • 2326-3881
DOI
10.1109/tse.2021.3128356
Cited by
15
References
6
Licence
Funders
H2020 European Institute of Innovation and Technology (732287)

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review