An Exploration of Cross-Patch Collaborations via Patch Linkage in OpenStack

Abstract

Contemporary development projects benefit from code review as it improves the quality of a project. Large ecosystems of interdependent projects like OpenStack generate a large number of reviews, which poses new challenges for collaboration (improving patches, fixing defects). Review tools allow developers to link between patches, to indicate patch dependency, competing solutions, or provide broader context. We hypothesize that such patch linkage may also simulate cross-collaboration. With a case study of OpenStack, we take a first step to explore collaborations that occur after a patch linkage was posted between two patches (i.e., cross-patch collaboration). Our empirical results show that a..