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Changes Are Similar: Measuring Similarity of Pull Requests That Change the Same Code in GitHub

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Software Engineering and Methodology for Emerging Domains (NASAC 2017, NASAC 2018)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 861))

Abstract

Pull-based development is widely used in globally collaborative platforms, such as GitHub and BitBucket. A pull request is a set of changes to existing source code in a project. A developer submits a pull request and tends to update the source code. Due to the parallel mechanism, several developers may submit multiple pull requests to change the same lines of code. This fact results in the conflict between changes, which makes the project manager difficult to decide which pull request should be merged. In this paper, we conducted a preliminary study on measuring the similarity of pull requests that aim to change the same code in GitHub. We proposed two methods, i.e., the cosine and the doc2vec, to quantify the structural similarity and the semantic similarity between pull requests and evaluated the similarity on four widely-studied open source Java projects. Our study shows that there indeed exists high similarity between competing pull requests and the similarity among projects diversifies. This complicates the merging decision by project managers.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Project spring-framework, http://github.com/spring-projects/spring-framework/.

  2. 2.

    Project spring-boot, http://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/.

  3. 3.

    Project incubator-dubbo, http://github.com/apache/incubator-dubbo/.

  4. 4.

    Project elasticsearch, http://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/.

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Acknowledgments

The work is supported by the National Key R&D Program of China under Grant No. 2018YFB1003901, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61502345 and 61872273, the Young Elite Scientists Sponsorship Program by CAST under Grant No. 2015QNRC001, and the Technological Innovation Projects of Hubei Province under Grant No. 2017AAA125.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, China

    Ping Ma, Danni Xu, Xin Zhang & Jifeng Xuan

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  1. Ping Ma
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  2. Danni Xu
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  3. Xin Zhang
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  4. Jifeng Xuan
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jifeng Xuan .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing, China

    Zheng Li

  2. Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China

    He Jiang

  3. Peking University, Beijing, China

    Ge Li

  4. Peking University, Beijing, China

    Minghui Zhou

  5. Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    Ming Li

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Ma, P., Xu, D., Zhang, X., Xuan, J. (2019). Changes Are Similar: Measuring Similarity of Pull Requests That Change the Same Code in GitHub. In: Li, Z., Jiang, H., Li, G., Zhou, M., Li, M. (eds) Software Engineering and Methodology for Emerging Domains. NASAC NASAC 2017 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 861. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0310-8_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0310-8_8

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-15-0309-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-15-0310-8

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