A Exploratory Study of @-Mention in GitHub's Pull-Requests

Pull-request mechanism is an outstanding social development method in Git Hub. @-mention is a social media tool that deeply integrated with pull-request mechanism. Recently, many research results show that social media tools can promote the collaborative software development, but few work focuses on the impacts of @-mention. In this paper, we conduct an exploratory study of @-mention in pull-request based software development, including its current situation and benefits. We obtain some interesting findings which indicate that @-mention is beneficial to the processing of pull-request. Our work also proposes some possible research directions and problems of the @-mention. It helps the developers and researchers notice the significance of @-mention in the pull-request based software development.