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arXiv · 2609.22625

Why Do Pull Requests Go Silent? Uncovering the Barriers to Contribution Completion in Open-Source Code Review

Md Shamimur Rahman·Farhana Akter·Md Mustakim Billah·Zadia Codabux·Chanchal K. Roy
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Abstract

Pull requests (PRs) underpin pull-based software development by enabling distributed code review and collaborative contribution in open-source projects. Yet many become inactive before integration and are eventually abandoned or closed, wasting contributor and maintainer effort. Although prior work has examined PR abandonment and review delays, less is known about the contribution types, discussion-level barriers, and post-stalling collaboration patterns associated with inactivity. We investigate which PR types most often stall, why inactivity occurs from authors' and reviewers' perspectives, and how stalling relates to later contributor and reviewer engagement. We analyzed 14,234 stalled PRs and 164,562 review comments from 19 popular GitHub repositories using stale-bot workflows. An LLM-based voting classifier categorized PRs by contribution type, while quantitative analysis was combined with qualitative coding of general and inline review discussions. Feature-enhancement and issue-fixing PRs formed the largest share, together exceeding 77% of classified stalled PRs. General comments linked stalling mainly to communication and coordination breakdowns, including missing interaction, delayed feedback, and unclear follow-up. Inline comments showed that inactivity does not always reflect disengagement: many PRs were blocked by technical or dependency issues, including failing checks, configuration problems, compatibility concerns, and environment mismatches. Only 39.56% of contributors later submitted another PR, and reviewer re-engagement with the same contributors was approximately 21%. PR inactivity is a socio-technical coordination problem involving communication, technical readiness, review ownership, and automation practices. We recommend type-aware triage, clearer review feedback, explicit ownership of next actions, CI blocker management, and cause-aware stale-bot interventions.

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Md Shamimur Rahman, Farhana Akter, Md Mustakim Billah, Zadia Codabux, Chanchal K. Roy. 2026-09-18. Why Do Pull Requests Go Silent? Uncovering the Barriers to Contribution Completion in Open-Source Code Review. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22625

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