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

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.