# Understanding the Helpfulness of Stale Bot for Pull-based Development: An Empirical Study of 20 Large Open-Source Projects

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18150 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18150/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Does Code Quality Affect Pull Request Acceptance? An empirical study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09321/) (2019)
- [Quality Gatekeepers: Investigating the Effects ofCode Review Bots on Pull Request Activities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13547/) (2021)
- [Don't Disturb Me: Challenges of Interacting with SoftwareBots on Open Source Software Projects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13950/) (2021)
- [Pull Request Latency Explained: An Empirical Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09946/) (2021)
- [On Wasted Contributions: Understanding the Dynamics of Contributor-Abandoned Pull Requests](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15447/) (2021)
- [On the Relationship Between the Developer's Perceptible Race and Ethnicity and the Evaluation of Contributions in OSS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06143/) (2021)
- [How Successful Are Open Source Contributions From Countries with Different Levels of Human Development?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03716/) (2020)
- [GAP2WSS: A Genetic Algorithm based on the Pareto Principle for Web Service Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10430/) (2021)
- [GitHub Actions: The Impact on the Pull Request Process](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14118/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Predicting the First Response Latency of Maintainers and Contributors in Pull Requests](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07786/) (2023)
- [The Impact of Environment Configurations on the Stability of AI-Enabled Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02825/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pull Requests (PRs) that are neither progressed nor resolved clutter the list of PRs, making it difficult for the maintainers to manage and prioritize unresolved PRs. To automatically track, follow up, and close such inactive PRs, Stale bot was introduced by GitHub. Despite its increasing adoption, there are ongoing debates on whether using Stale bot alleviates or exacerbates the problem of inactive PRs. To better understand if and how Stale bot helps projects in their pull-based development workflow, we perform an empirical study of 20 large and popular open-source projects. We find that Stale bot can help deal with a backlog of unresolved PRs as the projects closed more PRs within the first few months of adoption. Moreover, Stale bot can help improve the efficiency of the PR review process as the projects reviewed PRs that ended up merged and resolved PRs that ended up closed faster after the adoption. However, Stale bot can also negatively affect the contributors as the projects experienced a considerable decrease in their number of active contributors after the adoption. Therefore, relying solely on Stale bot to deal with inactive PRs may lead to decreased community engagement and an increased probability of contributor abandonment.