An Insight into the Pull Requests of GitHub
This study addresses the issue of pull request failures for GitHub developers and project administrators, but it is incremental as it provides descriptive analysis without proposing new methods.
The paper tackled the problem of unsuccessful pull requests in GitHub by conducting a comparative study of 103,192 pull requests from 78 projects, analyzing discussion texts, project details, and developer experience to report insights on success and failure factors.
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.