Yes, but consider this: how many scratchpad GitHub projects have actual bugfix PRs that are linked to filed and resolved bug tickets? The projects in this study

Yes, but consider this: how many scratchpad GitHub projects have actual bugfix PRs that are linked to filed and resolved bug tickets? The projects in this study were selected exactly on this basis. Further, the authors realise that GitHub projects may be biased: > GitHub may not be representative of projects, since proprietary projects tend not to use it. And, they overcome this bias by sampling, from all GitHub projects: > To construct a list of bugs we could uniformly sample, we took a snapshot of all publicly available JavaScript projects on GitHub, with their closed issue reports. We uniformly selected a closed and linked issue, using the procedure described above and stopped sampling when we reached 400 bugs. When you sample from all available JavaScript GitHub projects, you have a very high probability of overcoming representativeness bias.