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Why Did your PR Get Rejected?: Defining Guidelines for Avoiding PR Rejection in Open Source Projects

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Bruno da SilvaAuthors Info & Claims

ICSEW'20: Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops

Pages 165 - 168

https://doi.org/10.1145/3387940.3392235

Published: 25 September 2020 Publication History

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Abstract

Pull requests are a commonly used method of collaboration for software developers working on open source projects. In this paper, we analyze the most common reasons, sentiment polarity, and interaction length for pull request rejections, as well as the correlations between these factors in a large open-source project called Scapy. We manually analyzed 231 rejected pull requests and systematically mapped sentiment and categorized rejection reasons. We found that the most frequent reasons for pull request rejection refer to source code management issues, incomplete comprehension of project functionalities, poor understanding of what reviewers expect, and misunderstanding the project guidelines (often due to a lack of complete/updated instructions and communication gaps). This work is an ongoing effort toward establishing practical guidelines for globally distributed contributors in open-source projects to minimize pull request rejection and maximize productivity leading to more fruitful remote collaboration. Future work involves expanding the analysis to more projects and incorporating quantitative methods.

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Gottigundala TSereesathien Sda Silva B(2021)Qualitatively Analyzing PR Rejection Reasons from Conversations in Open-Source Projects2021 IEEE/ACM 13th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE)10.1109/CHASE52884.2021.00021(109-112)Online publication date: May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/CHASE52884.2021.00021

Index Terms

Why Did your PR Get Rejected?: Defining Guidelines for Avoiding PR Rejection in Open Source Projects
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Collaboration in software development
      1. Programming teams

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Published In

ICSEW'20: Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops

June 2020

831 pages

ISBN:9781450379632

DOI:10.1145/3387940

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 September 2020

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ICSE '20

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SIGSOFT
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ICSE '20: 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering

June 27 - July 19, 2020

Seoul, Republic of Korea

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Gottigundala TSereesathien Sda Silva B(2021)Qualitatively Analyzing PR Rejection Reasons from Conversations in Open-Source Projects2021 IEEE/ACM 13th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE)10.1109/CHASE52884.2021.00021(109-112)Online publication date: May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/CHASE52884.2021.00021

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Recommendations

Finding Impact Factors for Rejection of Pull Requests on GitHub

Which bugs are missed in code reviews: an empirical study on SmartSHARK dataset

How Do FOSS Communities Decide to Accept Pull Requests?