Should I Stale or Should I Close? An Analysis of a Bot That Closes Abandoned Issues and Pull Requests
Mairieli Santos Wessel, Igor Steinmacher, Igor Wiese, Marco Aurélio Gerosa · 2019
On GitHub, projects use bots to automate predefined and repetitive tasks related to issues and pull requests. Our research investigates the adoption of the stale bot, which helps maintainers triaging abandoned issues and pull requests. We analyzed the bots' configuration settings and their modifications over time. These settings define the time for tagging issues and pull request as stale and closing them. We collected data from 765 OSS projects hosted on GitHub. Our results indicate that most of the studied projects made no more than three modifications in the configurations file, issues tagged as bug reports are exempt from being considered stale, while the same occurs with pull requests that need some input to be processed.