Qualitatively Analyzing PR Rejection Reasons from Conversations in Open-Source Projects

Software developers have largely relied on pull requests as a mechanism of collaboration in their projects. Researchers have collected and analyzed pull request data in different ways for different reasons. In particular, we have qualitatively analyzed pull request conversation data to understand the main reasons for pull request rejection from a developer's perspective. In this paper, we report results from ongoing research on identifying and categorizing pull request rejection factors. Two software developers, co-authors of this paper, manually analyzed 605 rejected PRs from Hexo and ESLint. We found that the most frequent reasons for PR rejection may vary depending on the project size and popularity. Still, some common rejection factors include implementing unnecessary functionality, conflicting PRs, agreement to make PR reattempts, and inactivity. Code quality issues are not among the most frequent reasons.