A Comparative Study of the Effects of Pull Request on GitHub Projects
Jing Liu, Li Jiahao, Lulu He · 2016
There is a trend in increased social involvement in software development process. Facilities supporting distributed software development and management have become a common practice in the community. Public involvement is further promoted by the incorporation of the social network features brought about by GitHub. The “following”and “watching”mechanisms, together with the pull-request facility, encourage wider and deeper involvement of the general public. While earlier studies have begun to study the possible effects of the increased publicity, their approaches are based on qualitative methods and their conclusions are only tentative. In this paper, we conduct a comparative study on the effects of pull request on 461 GitHub projects. Correlation study, factor analysis and MannWhitneyWilcoxon Test are conducted on the bug report data we gather from GitHub. From the empirical observations, we found that employing pull request can help increase the social impact of projects, resulting in more active development activity. However, it could also lead to prolonged bug fixing time.