Finding Impact Factors for Rejection of Pull Requests on GitHub

Abstract

A pull request is an important method for code contributions in GitHub that will be submitted when the developers would like to merge their code changes from their local machine to the main repository on which all source code in the project are stored. Before merging the code changes into the main repository, the developers have to request for a permission. If their source code is allowed to merge, the pull request status is accepted. On the other hand, if their source code is not allowed to merge, the pull request status is rejected. The pull request status may be rejected due to several factors, such as code complexity, code quality, the number of changed files, etc. Fixing the rejected pull requests will take some extra effort and time which may affect the project cost and timeline. This paper aims at finding the impact factors that are associated with the rejection of pull requests on GitHub and also discovering the relationships among impact factors by using the association rules in data mining.