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ESEM 2021
Mon 11 - Fri 15 October 2021
Fri 15 Oct 2021 14:35 - 14:50 at ESEM ROOM - Mining Software Repositories Chair(s): Fabio Calefato

Background: Pull-based development has shaped the practice of Modern Code Review (MCR), in which reviewers can contribute code improvements, such as refactorings, through comments and commits in Pull Requests (PRs). Past MCR studies uniformly treat all PRs, regardless of whether they induce refactoring or not. We define a PR as refactoring-inducing, when refactoring edits are performed after the initial commit(s), as either a result of discussion among reviewers or spontaneous actions carried out by the PR developer.

Aims: This mixed study (quantitative and qualitative) explores code reviewing-related aspects intending to characterize refactoring-inducing PRs.

Method: We hypothesize that refactoring-inducing PRs have distinct characteristics than non-refactoring-inducing ones and thus deserve special attention and treatment from researchers, practitioners, and tool builders. To investigate our hypothesis, we mined a sample of 1,845 Apache’s merged PRs from GitHub, mined refactoring edits in these PRs, and ran a comparative study between refactoring-inducing and non-refactoring-inducing PRs. We also manually examined 2,096 review comments and 1,891 detected refactorings from 228 refactoring-inducing PRs.

Results: We found 30.2% of refactoring-inducing PRs in our sample and that they significantly differ from non-refactoring-inducing ones in terms of number of commits, code churn, number of file changes, number of review comments, length of discussion, and time to merge. However, we found no statistical evidence that the number of reviewers is related to refactoring-inducement. Our qualitative analysis revealed that at least one refactoring edit was induced by review in 133 (58.3%) of the refactoring-inducing PRs examined.

Conclusions: Our findings suggest directions for researchers, practitioners, and tool builders to improve practices around pull-based code review.

Fri 15 Oct

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change

14:20 - 15:20
Mining Software RepositoriesTechnical Papers at ESEM ROOM
Chair(s): Fabio Calefato University of Bari
14:20
15m
Talk
Characterizing and Predicting Good First Issues
Technical Papers
Yuekai Huang Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Junjie Wang Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences, Song Wang York University, Zhe Liu Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences, Dandan Wang Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qing Wang Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences
Pre-print
14:35
15m
Talk
An Empirical Study on Refactoring-Inducing Pull Requests
Technical Papers
Flavia Coelho Federal University of Campina Grande, Nikolaos Tsantalis Concordia University, Tiago Massoni Federal University of Campina Grande, Everton L. G. Alves Federal University of Campina Grande
Pre-print Media Attached
14:50
15m
Talk
Promises and Perils of Inferring Personality on GitHub
Technical Papers
Frenk van Mil Delft University of Technology, Ayushi Rastogi University of Groningen, The Netherlands, Andy Zaidman Delft University of Technology
Pre-print Media Attached
15:05
15m
Talk
An Exploratory Study on Dead Methods in Open-source Java Desktop Applications
Technical Papers
Danilo Caivano University of Bari, Pietro Cassieri University of Basilicata, Simone Romano University of Bari, Giuseppe Scanniello University of Basilicata

Information for Participants
Fri 15 Oct 2021 14:20 - 15:20 at ESEM ROOM - Mining Software Repositories Chair(s): Fabio Calefato
Info for room ESEM ROOM:

https://www.youtube.com/c/ESEM_Conference