To Follow or Not to Follow: Understanding Issue/Pull-Request Templates on GitHub

Abstract

For most Open Source Software (OSS) projects, issues and Pull-requests (PR) are the primary means by which stakeholders of a project report and discuss software problems and code changes, and their descriptions are important for people to understand them. To help ensure the informational quality of issue/PR descriptions, GitHub introduced the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">issue/PR template</i> feature, which pre-populates the description for anyone trying to open a new issue/PR. To better understand this feature, we report on a large-scale, mixed-methods empirical study of templates that explores contents, impacts, and perceptions. Our results show that templates typically contain elements to greet contributors, explain project guidelines, and collect relevant information. After template adoption, the monthly volume of incoming issues and PRs decreases, and issues have fewer monthly discussion comments and longer resolution duration. Although both contributors and maintainers positively rated the usefulness of templates from various aspects, they also reported challenges in using templates ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">e</i> . <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">g</i> . excessive and irrelevant information request) and suggested potential improvements of the template feature ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">e</i> . <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">g</i> . better user interaction and advanced automation). This work contributes to the informed use and targeted improvement of templates to enhance OSS practitioners' collaboration and interaction.