The Structure of Software Design Discussions

As a software system is iteratively developed, software developers engage in many discussions, often through written forms. Some of these discussions occur on pull requests and include information about the design of the system to which the code in the pull request is being contributed. Although previous work has shown that design is discussed in forums like pull requests, little is known about the form and content of the discussion about design. In this paper, we report on an in-depth analysis of three pull requests to better understand the form and content of design information in pull request discussions to enable the development of tools to help humans access this information.