Research On The Application Of Pull-Request Development Model In Software Engineering Courses

A critical goal of software engineering education is to train students to build the capability of collaboratively developing certain scale of software in the industrial context.To achieve this goal,an important way is to train them necessary skills of using collaborative development tools,especially for modern industrial ones.However,previous research has shown that recent graduates struggle with using such configuration management systems.To diminish the gap between classroom practice and industrial expectations,we seek for deploying a modern collaborative development paradigm—Pull-Request development model(P-R model)in students' practice for capstone projects.How can P-R model be applied to students' practice for capstone projects? What are the challenges that students face in the process? Based on these challenges,how should we improve the process? These problems are very important ones demanding prompt solutions when P-R model is applied in the classroom practice.This paper aims at software engineering education.From the students' perspective we delve into the different characteristics of P-R model,which is applied in the classroom practice so as to explore the best practice of efficient convergence contribution.To sum up,the main work of this paper can be listed as follows:First of all,we investigate and analyze the actual effects of P-R model during the process of applying it to the classroom practice.In order to apply the P-R model in classroom practice for supporting students' collaboration,we build the execution environment of P-R model and integrate it into the Trustie platform.Through this platform,we further our investigation and analysis to assess the actual effects of P-R model.Quantitative and qualitative results show some different characteristics of applying P-R model in the OSS context.Secondly,we study the reviewer recommender method in the classroom practice context.Based on the five features of students' development behaviors,we design a reviewer recommender method,which can effectively use the quality review mechanism in the P-R model so as to take the quality and effectiveness of students' collaborative development into full consideration.Based on previous analyses,we integrate these five typical characteristics of students' development behavior with each other,and then recommend the appropriate reviewer for the Pull request(PR)through the comprehensive relevance.Finally,we select the capstone projects on the Trustie platform for further test and evaluation.With the data of capstone projects we test the reviewer recommender method in stages,and then preliminary verify the effectiveness of the reviewer recommender method by means of feature matching.