On the impact of pull request decisions on future contributions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how pull request decisions on GitHub influence future contributions, revealing that acceptance encourages ongoing participation while rejection discourages further contributions.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on the impact of pull request outcomes on future contributions, highlighting the importance of acceptance in sustaining contributor engagement.

Findings

Higher acceptance rates correlate with continued contributions.

Rejections lead to fewer future pull requests.

Empirical analysis on three large GitHub projects.

Abstract

The pull-based development process has become prevalent on platforms such as GitHub as a form of distributed software development. Potential contributors can create and submit a set of changes to a software project through pull requests. These changes can be accepted, discussed or rejected by the maintainers of the software project, and can influence further contribution proposals. As such, it is important to examine the practices that encourage contributors to a project to submit pull requests. Specifically, we consider the impact of prior pull requests on the acceptance or rejection of subsequent pull requests. We also consider the potential effect of rejecting or ignoring pull requests on further contributions. In this preliminary research, we study three large projects on \textsf{GitHub}, using pull request data obtained through the \textsf{GitHub} API, and we perform empirical analyses to investigate the above questions. Our results show that continued contribution to a project is correlated with higher pull request acceptance rates and that pull request rejections lead to fewer future contributions.