Understanding the Helpfulness of Stale Bot for Pull-based Development

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