Teal Amore

Howdy! I’m Teal Amore, a master’s student in computer science at Eastern Michigan University. My work explores how technology can reduce barriers to health and improve quality of life for underserved communities.

While I am still trying to nail down my specific research interests, broadly I’m interested in digital health, participatory research, implementation science, and aiding marginalized communities. I’m particularly interested in understanding how research can move beyond publication and into real world practice. I also believe reproducibility is fundamental to scientific progress, and I’m interested in identifying barriers to reproducible research and encouraging more rigorous scientific practices.

Before transitioning into health-focused research, I spent nearly a decade as a software engineer and later conducted research in empirical software engineering, studying software testing practices and software engineering education.

latest posts

Jul 13, 2025	Developers Write Bad Unit Tests
Jun 20, 2025	Between- vs Within-Subject Research Design
Nov 26, 2024	Solovay-Strassen Revisited

selected publications

The Impact of Documentation on Test Engagement in Pull Requests in OSS

Teal Amore, Nathan Berman, and Siyuan Jiang

arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.23048, 2026

Abs DOI Bib

Automated testing is crucial for maintaining open-source software quality. However, motivating contributors to include tests for code changes remains a challenge. While existing interventions, such as code coverage metrics and reviewer feedback, are often reactive and applied only after a pull request is opened, this study investigates whether documentation on testing can serve as a proactive measure to encourage testing behavior. In this work, we investigate the relationship between documentation on testing and contributor testing behavior. We introduce the Test Engagement Ratio (TER) to help understand testing frequency. Using data from 160 OSS repositories, we analyze the relationship between documentation comprehensiveness and TER. Our results show a weak but statistically significant positive correlation (ρ=0.36, p<0.001), which strengthens to a moderate relationship (ρ=0.44) in repositories with higher pull request activity. Documentation categories such as How to Run Tests and How to Write Tests show the strongest correlation with testing engagement. Furthermore, TER is found to be moderately correlated (ρ=0.52, p<0.001) with Test Code Ratio, providing preliminary evidence of its validity. Our findings suggest that documentation on testing may be associated with increased testing engagement. Future work will explore causality, documentation quality at a granular level, and cross-repository exposure effects.
@article{amore2026impact, title = {The Impact of Documentation on Test Engagement in Pull Requests in OSS}, author = {Amore, Teal and Berman, Nathan and Jiang, Siyuan}, journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.23048}, year = {2026}, doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2604.23048} }