Relationship between Geographical Location and Evaluation of Developer Contributions in GitHub

Ayushi Rastogi, Nachiappan Nagappan, Georgios Gousios, André van der Hoek

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

32 Citations (Scopus)
226 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Background: Open source software projects show gender bias suggesting that other demographic characteristics of developers, like geographical location, can negatively influence evaluation of contributions too. Aim: This study contributes to this emerging body of knowledge in software development by presenting a quantitative analysis of the relationship between the geographical location of developers and evaluation of their contributions on GitHub. Method: We present an analysis of 70,000+ pull requests selected from 17 most actively participating countries to model the relationship between the geographical location of developers and pull request acceptance decision. Results and Conclusion: We observed structural differences in pull request acceptance rates across 17 countries. Countries with no apparent similarities such as Switzerland and Japan had one of the highest pull request acceptance rates while countries like China and Germany had one of the lowest pull request acceptance rates. Notably, higher acceptance rates were observed for all but one country when pull requests were evaluated by developers from the same country.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationESEM ’18
Subtitle of host publicationProceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
Place of PublicationNew York, NY
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Pages1-8
Number of pages8
ISBN (Print)978-1-4503-5823-1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2018
Event12th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement: ESEM 2018 - Oulu, Finland
Duration: 10 Oct 201812 Oct 2018
Conference number: 12

Conference

Conference12th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
Country/TerritoryFinland
CityOulu
Period10/10/1812/10/18

Bibliographical note

Accepted author manuscript

Keywords

  • Open source
  • geographical location
  • pull requests
  • GitHub

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