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Related papers: The Value of Effective Pull Request Description

200 papers

Pull Request (PR) is the main method for code contributions from the external contributors in GitHub. PR review is an essential part of open source software developments to maintain the quality of software. Matching a new PR for an…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-10-31 Zhifang Liao , Yanbing Li , Jinsong Wu , Dayu He , Xiaoping Fan , Yan Zhang

Autonomous coding agents are reshaping software development by creating pull requests (PRs) on GitHub, referred to as agentic PRs. In parallel, the review process is also becoming autonomous, thereby making reviewer bots key actors in the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Syeda Kaneez Fatima , Yousuf Abrar , Abdul Rehman Tahir , Amelia Nawaz , Shamsa Abid , Abdul Ali Bangash

AI coding agents are now submitting pull requests (PRs) to software projects, acting not just as assistants but as autonomous contributors. As these agentic contributions are rapidly increasing across real repositories, little is known…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Ramtin Ehsani , Sakshi Pathak , Shriya Rawal , Abdullah Al Mujahid , Mia Mohammad Imran , Preetha Chatterjee

Pull request (PR) review is essential for ensuring software quality, yet automating this task remains challenging due to noisy supervision, limited contextual understanding, and inadequate evaluation metrics. We present Sphinx, a unified…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Daoan Zhang , Shuo Zhang , Zijian Jin , Jiebo Luo , Shengyu Fu , Elsie Nallipogu

AI coding agents are increasingly acting as autonomous contributors by generating and submitting pull requests (PRs). However, we lack empirical evidence on how these agent-generated PRs differ from human contributions, particularly in how…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Daniel Ogenrwot , John Businge

Software projects frequently use automation tools to perform repetitive activities in the distributed software development process. Recently, GitHub introduced GitHub Actions, a feature providing automated workflows for software projects.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Mairieli Wessel , Joseph Vargovich , Marco A. Gerosa , Christoph Treude

The automatic generation of pull requests (PRs) using AI agents has become increasingly common. Although AI-generated PRs are fast and easy to create, their merge rates have been reported to be lower than those created by humans. In this…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Haruhiko Yoshioka , Takahiro Monno , Haruka Tokumasu , Taiki Wakamatsu , Yuki Ota , Nimmi Weeraddana , Kenichi Matsumoto

A central function of code review is to increase understanding; helping reviewers understand a code change aids in knowledge transfer and finding bugs. Comments in code largely serve a similar purpose, helping future readers understand the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-04-04 Nikitha Rao , Jason Tsay , Martin Hirzel , Vincent J. Hellendoorn

The success of a Pull Request (PR) depends on the responsiveness of the maintainers and the contributor during the review process. Being aware of the expected waiting times can lead to better interactions and managed expectations for both…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-08-23 SayedHassan Khatoonabadi , Ahmad Abdellatif , Diego Elias Costa , Emad Shihab

Pull request (PR) descriptions generated by AI coding agents are the primary channel for communicating code changes to human reviewers. However, the alignment between these messages and the actual changes remains unexplored, raising…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Jingzhi Gong , Giovanni Pinna , Yixin Bian , Jie M. Zhang

Autonomous coding agents are increasingly deployed as AI teammates in modern software engineering, independently authoring pull requests (PRs) that modify production code at scale. This study aims to systematically characterize how…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Mohammed Latif Siddiq , Xinye Zhao , Vinicius Carvalho Lopes , Beatrice Casey , Joanna C. S. Santos

The pull-based development model facilitates global collaboration within open-source software projects. However, whereas it is increasingly common for software to depend on other projects in their ecosystem, most research on the pull…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Willem Meijer , Mirela Riveni , Ayushi Rastogi

Autonomous coding agents increasingly contribute to software development by submitting pull requests on GitHub; yet, little is known about how these contributions integrate into human-driven review workflows. We present a large empirical…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Costain Nachuma , Minhaz Zibran

AI coding agents increasingly submit pull requests (Agentic-PRs) to open-source repositories, yet their performance is commonly assessed using merge and rejection outcomes alone. We hypothesized that these outcome labels do not reliably…

Code reviews are central for software quality assurance. Ideally, reviewers should explain their feedback to enable authors of code changes to understand the feedback and act accordingly. Different developers might need different…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Ratnadira Widyasari , Ting Zhang , Abir Bouraffa , Walid Maalej , David Lo

Background. Pull requests are a common practice for contributing and reviewing contributions, and are employed both in open-source and industrial contexts. One of the main goals of code reviews is to find defects in the code, allowing…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-08-27 Valentina Lenarduzzi , Vili Nikkola , Nyyti Saarimäki , Davide Taibi

Peer code reviews are crucial for maintaining the quality of the code in software repositories. Developers have introduced a number of software bots to help with the code review process. Despite the benefits of automating code review tasks,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-05-11 Nivishree Palvannan , Chris Brown

The pull-based development process has become prevalent on platforms such as GitHub as a form of distributed software development. Potential contributors can create and submit a set of changes to a software project through pull requests.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-12-18 Damien Legay , Alexandre Decan , Tom Mens

Motivation: Code understandability is crucial in software development, as developers spend 58% to 70% of their time reading source code. Improving it can improve productivity and reduce maintenance costs. Problem: Experimental studies often…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Delano Oliveira , Reydne Santos , Benedito de Oliveira , Martin Monperrus , Fernando Castor , Fernanda Madeiral

Autonomous coding agents are generating code at an unprecedented scale, with OpenAI Codex alone creating over 400,000 pull requests (PRs) in two months. As agentic PR volumes increase, code review agents (CRAs) have become routine…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Kowshik Chowdhury , Dipayan Banik , K M Ferdous , Shazibul Islam Shamim