research-article

Should I stale or should I close?: an analysis of a bot that closes abandoned issues and pull requests

Authors:

Mairieli Wessel,

Igor Steinmacher,

Marco A. GerosaAuthors Info & Claims

BotSE '19: Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Bots in Software Engineering

Pages 38 - 42

https://doi.org/10.1109/BotSE.2019.00018

Published: 27 May 2019 Publication History

Abstract

On GitHub, projects use bots to automate predefined and repetitive tasks related to issues and pull requests. Our research investigates the adoption of the stale bot, which helps maintainers triaging abandoned issues and pull requests. We analyzed the bots' configuration settings and their modifications over time. These settings define the time for tagging issues and pull request as stale and closing them. We collected data from 765 OSS projects hosted on GitHub. Our results indicate that most of the studied projects made no more than three modifications in the configurations file, issues tagged as bug reports are exempt from being considered stale, while the same occurs with pull requests that need some input to be processed.

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Cited By

Khatoonabadi SCosta DMujahid SShihab E(2023)Understanding the Helpfulness of Stale Bot for Pull-Based Development: An Empirical Study of 20 Large Open-Source ProjectsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/362473933:2(1-43)Online publication date: 23-Dec-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3624739
Asthana SSajnani HVoyloshnikova EAcharya BHerzig KChandra SBlincoe KTonella P(2023)A Case Study of Developer Bots: Motivations, Perceptions, and ChallengesProceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3611643.3616248(1268-1280)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3611643.3616248
Khatoonabadi SCosta DAbdalkareem RShihab E(2023)On Wasted Contributions: Understanding the Dynamics of Contributor-Abandoned Pull Requests–A Mixed-Methods Study of 10 Large Open-Source ProjectsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/353078532:1(1-39)Online publication date: 13-Feb-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3530785
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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

BotSE '19: Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Bots in Software Engineering

May 2019

72 pages

Conference Chairs:
Emad Shihab
Concordia University
,
Stefan Wagner
University of Stuttgart

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SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering
IEEE-CS: Computer Society

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IEEE Press

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Published: 27 May 2019

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ICSE '19

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SIGSOFT
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ICSE '19: 41st International Conference on Software Engineering

May 27, 2019

Quebec, Montreal, Canada

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ICSE 2025

2025 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering

April 26 - May 3, 2025

Ottawa , ON , Canada

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Cited By

Khatoonabadi SCosta DMujahid SShihab E(2023)Understanding the Helpfulness of Stale Bot for Pull-Based Development: An Empirical Study of 20 Large Open-Source ProjectsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/362473933:2(1-43)Online publication date: 23-Dec-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3624739
Asthana SSajnani HVoyloshnikova EAcharya BHerzig KChandra SBlincoe KTonella P(2023)A Case Study of Developer Bots: Motivations, Perceptions, and ChallengesProceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3611643.3616248(1268-1280)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3611643.3616248
Khatoonabadi SCosta DAbdalkareem RShihab E(2023)On Wasted Contributions: Understanding the Dynamics of Contributor-Abandoned Pull Requests–A Mixed-Methods Study of 10 Large Open-Source ProjectsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/353078532:1(1-39)Online publication date: 13-Feb-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3530785
Wu XGao AZhang YWang TTang Y(2022)A Preliminary Study of Bots Usage in Open Source CommunityProceedings of the 13th Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware10.1145/3545258.3545284(175-180)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3545258.3545284
Moharil AOrlov DJameel STrouwen TCassee NSerebrenik ALo DMcIntosh SNovielli N(2022)Between JIRA and GitHubProceedings of the 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/3524842.3528528(112-116)Online publication date: 23-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3524842.3528528
Tuna EKovalenko VTüzün EHarman MMiller H(2022)Bug tracking process smells in practiceProceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice10.1145/3510457.3513080(77-86)Online publication date: 21-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3510457.3513080
Zimmermann TCoolen JGross JPédrot PGilbert G(2022)The Advantages of Maintaining a Multitask, Project-Specific Bot: An Experience ReportIEEE Software10.1109/MS.2022.317977339:5(32-37)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/MS.2022.3179773
Cogo FHassan A(2022)Understanding the Customization of Dependency Bots: The Case of DependabotIEEE Software10.1109/MS.2022.317948439:5(44-49)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/MS.2022.3179484
Golzadeh MLegay DDecan AMens T(2020)Bot or not?Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops10.1145/3387940.3391503(31-35)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3387940.3391503
Tan XZhou MFitzgerald BRothermel GBae D(2020)Scaling open source communitiesProceedings of the ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3377811.3380920(1222-1234)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2020
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