bitcoin/.github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md

Pull requests without a rationale and clear improvement may be closed immediately.

Please provide clear motivation for your patch and explain how it improves Bitcoin Core user experience or Bitcoin Core developer experience significantly.

• Any test improvements or new tests that improve coverage are always welcome.
• All other changes should have accompanying unit tests (see src/test/) or functional tests (see test/). Contributors should note which tests cover modified code. If no tests exist for a region of modified code, new tests should accompany the change.
• Bug fixes are most welcome when they come with steps to reproduce or an explanation of the potential issue as well as reasoning for the way the bug was fixed.
• Features are welcome, but might be rejected due to design or scope issues. If a feature is based on a lot of dependencies, contributors should first consider building the system outside of Bitcoin Core, if possible.
• Refactoring changes are only accepted if they are required for a feature or bug fix or otherwise improve developer experience significantly. For example, most "code style" refactoring changes require a thorough explanation why they are useful, what downsides they have and why they significantly improve developer experience or avoid serious programming bugs. Note that code style is often a subjective matter. Unless they are explicitly mentioned to be preferred in the developer notes, stylistic code changes are usually rejected.

Bitcoin Core has a thorough review process and even the most trivial change needs to pass a lot of eyes and requires non-zero or even substantial time effort to review. There is a huge lack of active reviewers on the project, so patches often sit for a long time.