Analyzing the Impact of Social Attributes on Commit Integration Success

As the software development community makes it easier to contribute to open source projects, the number of commits and pull requests keep increasing. However, this exciting growth renders it more difficult to only accept quality contributions. Recent research has found that both technical and social factors predict the success of project contributions on GitHub. We take this question a step further, focusing on predicting continuous integration build success based on technical and social factors involved in a commit. Specifically, we investigated if social factors (such as being a core member of the development team, having a large number of followers, or contributing a large number of commits) improve predictions of build success. We found that social factors cause a noticeable increase in predictive power (12%), core team members are more likely to pass the build tests (10%), and users with 1000 or more followers are more likely to pass the build tests (10%).