Relationship between Geographical Location and Evaluation of Developer Contributions in GitHub

Conference paper (2018)

Authors

A. Rastogi University of California
Nachiappan Nagappan Microsoft Research
G. Gousios Software Engineering - EEMCS
André van der Hoek University of California
Research Group
Software Engineering (EEMCS) (TU Delft)
Copyright: © 2018 A. Rastogi, Nachiappan Nagappan, G. Gousios, André van der Hoek
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3239235.3240504
GitHub Open source Pull requests Geographical location
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Published Date

2018

Language

English

Reuse Rights

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Department

Software Technology

Research Group

Software Engineering

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.