An Insight into the Pull Requests of GitHub

TL;DR

This study analyzes successful and unsuccessful GitHub pull requests across numerous projects to identify key factors influencing their outcomes, providing insights to improve developer practices and project management.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive comparative analysis of pull request success factors using diverse data from a large-scale GitHub study, highlighting actionable insights.

Findings

Discussion text characteristics differ between success and failure

Project domain and maturity influence pull request outcomes

Developer experience impacts pull request success rates

Abstract

Given the increasing number of unsuccessful pull requests in GitHub projects, insights into the success and failure of these requests are essential for the developers. In this paper, we provide a comparative study between successful and unsuccessful pull requests made to 78 GitHub base projects by 20,142 developers from 103,192 forked projects. In the study, we analyze pull request discussion texts, project specific information (e.g., domain, maturity), and developer specific information (e.g., experience) in order to report useful insights, and use them to contrast between successful and unsuccessful pull requests. We believe our study will help developers overcome the issues with pull requests in GitHub, and project administrators with informed decision making.