• Before writing a patch, developers should first make sure that it indeed addresses an issue within the project’s scope and relevant to the project’s focus (Section III-A).
• Instead of solely focusing on whether the patch fixes the target bug, developers should also be careful of not introducing new bugs, which will be expensive in terms of patch review efforts and the long-term maintainability of the project (Section IV-B).
• Instead of solely focusing on whether the patch works, developers should also consider whether it works well and whether there are better alternative solutions. Patch reviewers appear to be more serious about suboptimal patches than patch writers expect (Section IV-A).
• Developers should check whether their patches are “more” or “less”: “more” as in including unnecessary or irrelevant changes and “less” as in not including certain use cases and being incomplete(SectionIII-A).
• Developers should include or update necessary documentation in their patches. For reviewers, a patch with inconsistent or misleading documentation is highly unacceptable (Section III-B).
• Developers should minimize the high-level impact of a patch on the project schedule and avoid delaying the development of other features (Section III-A).
• Developers should actively communicate with other team members before and after submitting their patches, which increases the chance of the patches being accepted (Section III-A).