An Empirical Study On The Influence Of Pull Request Complexity On Integration In GitHub

GitHub is a popular coding platform that provides the infrastructure to facilitate collaborative development.A Pull Request(PR)is one of the keys to enabling collaboration.Developers are encouraged to submit PRs,and project maintainers integrate their contributions.In fact,not all committed PRs can be integrated into the code base by the project maintainer.The factors affecting PRs integration have been studied.However,the complexity of PRs commonly mentioned by researchers has not been thoroughly studied.Therefore,in this paper,the influence of PRs complexity on PR integration in GitHub is explored.Experiments were conducted on 59,566 closed PRs in the 10 most followed Java Script projects.Firstly,the index of complexity of PRs is determined.Then through the experiment of three research problems,the boxchart is used to explain the difference of PRs complexity between different projects.Meanwhile,the influence of PRs complexity and PRs integration is measured by constructing the linear mixed effect model and the generalized linear mixed model,including the decision of merging PRs and the time cost of closing PRs.The results show that :(1)the complexity of PRs does vary among different projects.(2)A PR with less complexity is easier to be merged into the code base.(3)the complexity of PRs has negligible impact on the time cost of closing PRs.Finally,this paper discusses the results of the open source project maintainers and developers of some of the enlightenment,and the complexities of PRs and close the PRs time costs related to do the further research,the study found:A particularly complex PR was largely rejected without the scrutiny of censors.Our research shows developers evidence of how to make better contributions to facilitate effective collaboration.