Does Code Quality Affect Pull Request Acceptance? An empirical study

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1908.09321
• Publication Date: 2019-01-01
• Authors: Valentina Lenarduzzi; Vili Nikkola; Nyyti Saarimäki; Davide Taibi
• Keywords: Code review; Code smell; Affect

Background. Pull requests are a common practice for contributing and reviewing contributions, employed both in open-source industrial contexts. One of the main goals code reviews is to find defects code, allowing project maintainers easily integrate external contributions into discuss contributions. Objective. The goal this paper understand whether quality actually considered when pull accepted. Specifically, we aim at understanding issues such as smells, antipatterns, coding style violations request affect chance its acceptance reviewed by maintainer project. Method. We conducted case study among 28 Java projects, analyzing presence 4.7 M 36 K requests. analyzed further correlations applying Logistic Regression seven machine learning techniques (Decision Tree, Random Forest, Extremely Randomized Trees, AdaBoost, Gradient Boosting, XGBoost). Results. Unexpectedly, turned out not all. As suggested other works, factors reputation importance feature delivered might be more important than terms acceptance. Conclusions. Researchers already investigated influence developers' This first work investigating if affects or not. recommend that researchers investigate topic different measures tools could provide some useful measures.