An Insight into the Pull Requests of GitHub

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 from103,192 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 un- successful pull requests. We believe our study will help developers overcome the issues with pull requests in GitHub, and project administrators with informed decision making.

Experimental Data

Related Publication(s)

• M. Masudur Rahman and C.K. Roy, "An Insight into the Pull Requests of GitHub", In Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories ( MSR 2014), pp. 364--367, Hyderabad, India, May 2014

@inproceedings{msrch2014masud, 
author = {Rahman, Mohammad Masudur and Roy, Chanchal K.}, 
title = {An Insight into the Pull Requests of GitHub}, 
booktitle = {Proc. MSR}, 
pages = {364--367},
year={2014}} 

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© Masud Rahman, Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan, Canada.