Title: Is It Safe to Uplift This Patch? An Empirical Study on Mozilla Firefox,
Abstract: In rapid release development processes, patches that fix critical issues, or
implement high-value features are often promoted directly from the development
channel to a stabilization channel, potentially skipping one or more
stabilization channels. This practice is called patch uplift. Patch uplift is
risky, because patches that are rushed through the stabilization phase can end
up introducing regressions in the code. This paper examines patch uplift
operations at Mozilla, with the aim to identify the characteristics of uplifted
patches that introduce regressions. Through statistical and manual analyses, we
quantitatively and qualitatively investigate the reasons behind patch uplift
decisions and the characteristics of uplifted patches that introduced
regressions. Additionally, we interviewed three Mozilla release managers to
understand organizational factors that affect patch uplift decisions and
outcomes. Results show that most patches are uplifted because of a wrong
functionality or a crash. Uplifted patches that lead to faults tend to have
larger patch size, and most of the faults are due to semantic or memory errors
in the patches. Also, release managers are more inclined to accept patch uplift
requests that concern certain specific components, and-or that are submitted by
certain specific developers.