Empirical Analysis of Affect of Merged Issues on GitHub

Abstract

Pull-request based workflows are popular trends of modern software development platform such as GitHub. A pull-request notifies other developers that new changes are proposed, a code review process follows the pull-request that may be merged in the main branch if other developers accept the changes. Many factors influence the acceptance of pull-requests. Since open source software is based on collaboration, it is essential to discover how the affect expressed by developer discussing pull-request issues, namely how they collaborate, influences the acceptance of the pull-request proposed. In this study we analysed the relations with the affect expressed in pull-request issues'comments and whether an issue is merged in the main branch or not. We focused on pull-request issues and we found that issues with higher level anger, sadness, arousal and valence are less likely to be merged while issues with higher level of valence, joy are more likely to be merged. Positive affect indicates a good collaboration environment, and our finding shows that this healthy collaboration is likely to increase the acceptance of pull-requests.