A Longitudinal Analysis of Good First Issue Practices and Newcomer Pull Requests in Popular OSS Projects

TL;DR

This longitudinal study of 37 popular GitHub OSS projects reveals stable newcomer engagement with GFI issues despite a decline in GFI label usage and a decreasing merge rate of newcomer pull requests over four years.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale, longitudinal analysis of GFI practices and newcomer pull request success, highlighting evolving onboarding dynamics in OSS communities.

Findings

GFI label usage remained stable initially but declined significantly after January 2024.

Newcomer engagement with GFI issues stayed around 27% despite label decline.

Merge rate of newcomer GFI pull requests decreased from 61.9% to 42.2% over four years.

Abstract

Open-source software (OSS) projects rely on effective newcomer onboarding to sustain their communities. OSS projects widely adopt "good first issue" (GFI) labels to highlight beginner-friendly tasks. As development practices continue to evolve, understanding how these onboarding mechanisms change over time is important for both maintainers and researchers. This study analyzes 406,826 issues and 1,117 newcomer GFI pull requests across 37 popular GitHub repositories (30 of which use GFI labels) over a four-year period from July 2021 to June 2025. We find that while the proportion of issues with GFI labels remained stable during the first three years, it underwent a statistically significant decline beginning in January 2024, with substantial variation across projects not explained by repository age or programming language. Despite this supply-side decline, newcomer engagement with GFI issues remains stable at approximately 27%, suggesting that GFI labels maintain consistent attractiveness. Examining the outcomes of this engagement, we find that the merge rate of newcomer GFI pull requests declined from 61.9% to 42.2%. Initial pull request characteristics such as description length and code size show no significant association with merge outcomes, indicating that success is not predicted by the quantitative characteristics of the initial submission alone. Together, these findings reveal a widening gap between stable newcomer interest in GFIs and the declining availability and success of GFI-based onboarding, underscoring the need for maintainers to sustain both GFI labeling and review support.