Pharo git thermite a visual tool for deciding to weld a pull request

Abstract

Collaborative software development platforms such as GitHub simplify the process of contributing into open source projects by the use of a pull request. The decision of accepting or rejecting a pull request has to be made by an integrator. Because reviewing a pull request can be time consuming, social factors are known to have an important effect on the acceptation of a pull request. This effect can be especially important for large and complicated pull request. In this paper we present Git Thermite, a tool to assess the internal structure of a pull request and simplifying the job of the integrator. Git Thermite details the structural changes made on the source code. In Git Thermite we use a pull request business card visual metaphor for describing a pull request. In this business card, we present the pull request metadata and describe the modified files, and the structural changes in the modified source code.