On the impact of pull request decisions on future contributions

[en] The pull-based development process has become prevalent on platforms such as GitHubas 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 re-quests 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 GitHub, using pull request data obtained through the 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.

Disciplines :

Computer science
Electrical & electronics engineering

Author, co-author :

Legay, Damien ; Université de Mons > Faculté des Sciences > Service de Génie Logiciel

Decan, Alexandre ; Université de Mons > Faculté des Sciences > Service des Systèmes d'information ; Université de Mons > Faculté des Sciences > Service de Génie Logiciel

Mens, Tom ; Université de Mons > Faculté des Sciences > Service de Génie Logiciel

Language :

English

Title :

On the impact of pull request decisions on future contributions

Publication date :

15 May 2019

Event name :

Belgium-Netherlands Software Evolution Workshop (BENEVOL)

Event place :

Delft, Netherlands

Event date :

2018

Research unit :

S852 - Génie Logiciel

Research institute :

R300 - Institut de Recherche en Technologies de l'Information et Sciences de l'Informatique
R150 - Institut de Recherche sur les Systèmes Complexes

Available on ORBi UMONS :

since 17 December 2020

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