Patch rejection in Firefox: negative reviews, backouts, and issue reopening

Abstract

Background

Writing patches to fix bugs or implement new features is an important software development task, as it contributes to raise the quality of a software system. Not all patches are accepted in the first attempt, though. Patches can be rejected because of problems found during code review, automated testing, or manual testing. A high rejection rate, specially later in the lifecycle, may indicate problems with the software development process.;

Method

In order to characterize patch rejection, we relied on issues and source code commits from over four years of the projects history. We computed monthly metrics on the occurrence of three indicators of patch rejection