We are Omar Elazhary, Matthieu Foucault, and Margaret-Anne Storey, computer science researchers from the University of Victoria. Our team is investigating the usage of automated tool support, and how those tools impact pull request evaluation and the pull request submission workflow. We’d be grateful if you could help us understand this further by completing the survey below. It should take approximately 25 minutes of your time.
The tools we are investigating include all those that are associated to a pull request or commit, whether they appear as checks, automated comments, or via any other medium. We are also interested in other tools you might be using that do not officially show up on your software repository provider's platform, but also help you throughout the pull request evaluation process.

This survey will help us in understanding how software reviewers use the tools available to them, and whether these tools fulfill their needs. We will openly publish the results so everyone can benefit from them, but will anonymize everything before doing so. Your responses will be handled confidentially. There will be an opportunity near the end of the survey to sign up for an interview if you would like to contribute more. Also, we will be sending out a report detailing the effects of integration usage in software repositories based on the results of this survey to all respondents who provide their contact information at the end of the survey.

This survey focuses on the usage of automated tools from the perspective of the reviewer of a pull request. If you also used such tools as a contributor, i.e. as a submitter of a pull request, you are more than welcome to take part in our other survey here: Contributor Survey

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* 1. What are the benefits and challenges?

DISCLAIMER

This study has been reviewed and approved by the Human Ethics Research Board at the University of Victoria. If you wish to read more details and review the consent form for this survey, please click here.

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* 2. How long have you been involved in developing software?

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* 3. How many projects (open source and others) are you actively reviewing contributions for?

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* 4. How many pull requests do you typically review on a monthly basis?

About Integrations/Tools:
We consider an integration to be a tool that integrates with the repository management system and provides feedback within the user interface of that system. Examples of feedback that these tools provide can be (1) a badge in your README.md (e.g., code climate), (2) minimal feedback within a pull request (e.g. TravisCI or Codacy), or (3) detailed feedback within a pull request like codecov.

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Example of minimal feedback on a pull request

Example of minimal feedback on a pull request

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Example of detailed feedback on a pull request

Example of detailed feedback on a pull request

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* 5. Which of the following tools have you used over the past 3 months, either locally on your development machine, as part of continuous integration (CI), or as an integration that was required by your projects' contribution guidelines?
Check all that apply.

  Locally on my machine Acts as part of an automated CI build Integrated with your repo management system (no feedback on pull requests) Integrated with your repo management system (with minimal feedback on PRs i.e. a checkmark) Integrated with your repo management system (with detailed feedback on pull requests)
TravisCI Logo Travis CI
AppVeyor Logo AppVeyor
Coveralls Logo coveralls
CircleCI logo CircleCI
Codecov Logo codecov
Scrutinizer Logo scrutinizer
StyleCI Logo StyleCI
Hound Logo Hound
Codeship Logo Codeship
Jenkins Logo Jenkins
Wercker Logo Wercker
Semaphore CI Logo Semaphore CI
Code Climate Logo Code Climate
Codacy Logo Codacy
TeamCity Logo TeamCity
QuantifiedCode Logo QuantifiedCode
Bithound Logo BitHound
Shippable Logo Shippable
VersionEye Logo VersionEye
SonarQube SonarQube
ReviewNinja Logo ReviewNinja
SourceGraph SourceGraph
Zappr Logo Zappr
Sensio Labs Insight Logo Sensio Labs Insight
Hakiri Logo Hakiri
For the following questions, please consider the repository where you review the most pull requests.

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* 6. Where are the guidelines (e.g. a style guide) for contributing to the project specified?

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* 7. If the project does have contribution guidelines defined, please provide examples.

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* 8. How do you ensure that submitters' contributions follow the project guidelines?

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* 9. Are there tools that are not required by the contribution guidelines, but that you still use when evaluating a contribution?

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* 10. Are there tools that are not required by the contribution guidelines, but that you still use when evaluating a contribution?If yes, which tools do you use, and why do you use them?

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* 11. Please rate your level of agreement with the following statements.

  Strongly Disagree Disagree Agree Strongly Agree
"The usage of integrations makes the review process objective."
"The usage of integrations makes the review process transparent."

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* 12. Please elaborate on why you agree/disagree with the statements above.

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* 13. Below are information sources commonly accessed to reason about the quality of a contribution. Please rank them from most used to least used.

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* 14. Are there other resources that you use but are not mentioned above? If yes, which do you most frequently use?

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* 15. Which steps do you need to perform locally while reviewing a pull request, as opposed to having a tool/integration do them?

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* 16. If you selected an option in the previous question, why do you perform them locally?

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* 17. Which of the tools/integrations that you previously chose/listed do you feel best helps you evaluate incoming pull requests according to the guidelines specified by the project you review for?

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* 18. Do you use any integrations/tools whose checks you consider of low priority and do not have much effect on the pull request evaluation process?If yes, please provide examples.

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* 19. Do contributors ask you to help them with their failing tool/integration results? If yes, please give example(s).

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* 20. Approximately how many such requests have your received in the previous month?

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* 21. What functionality would you like to have as an integration?

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* 22. Tools that enable the automation of tasks within the pull request submission process do not provide as much value to the review process as they do the implementation process.
Do you agree with the above statement? Why or why not?

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* 23. Do you have any additional comments?

___________________________________

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* 24. Would you like to be directly notified about the results of this study, and any publications that would result from it? If yes, please fill in your email below.

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* 25. Would you be available for a 30 minute interview over Skype or Google Hangouts? We’ll use the email filled in above to contact you.

Thank you for taking the time to fill out this survey!!

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