Open source projects have an increasing importance on modern software development. For this reason, these projects, as usual with commercial software projects, should make use of promotion channels to communicate and establish contact with users and contributors. In this article, we study the channels used to promote a set of 100 popular GitHub projects. First, we reveal that Twitter, user meetings, and blogs are the most common promotion channels used by the studied projects. Second, we report a major difference between the studied projects and a random sample of projects, regarding the use of the investigated promotion channels. Third, we show the importance of a popular news aggregation site (Hacker News) on the promotion of open source. We conclude by presenting a set of practical recommendation to open source project managers and leaders, regarding the promotion of their projects.
Nowadays, Computer Science tightly entered all spheres of human activity. To improve quality and speed of development process, it is important to help programmers improve their working conditions. This paper proposes a vision on exploring this issue and presents in conjunction a factor that has been claimed multiple time to affect the effectiveness of software production, concentration and attention of software developers. We choose to focus on developers brain activity and features that can be extracted from it.
Large-scale distributed projects are typically the results of collective efforts performed by multiple developers, each one having a different personality. The study of developers' personalities has the potential of explaining their' behavior in various contexts. For example, the propensity to trust others, a critical factor to the success of global software engineering - has been found to influence positively the result of code reviews in distributed projects. In this paper, we perform a quantitative analysis of developers' personality in open source software projects, intended as an extreme …
Open-source developers, particularly the elite developers, maintain a diverse portfolio of contributing activities. They do not only commit source code but also spend a significant amount of effort on other communicative, organizational, and supportive activities. However, almost all prior research focuses on a limited number of specific activities and fails to analyze elite developers' activities in a comprehensive way. To bridge this gap, we conduct an empirical study with fine-grained event data from 20 large open-source projects hosted on GitHub. Thus, we investigate elite developers' cont…
Creating a successful and sustainable Open Source Software (OSS) project often depends on the strength and the health of the community behind it. Current literature explains the contributors' lifecycle, starting with the motivations that drive people to contribute and barriers to joining OSS projects, covering developers' evolution until they become core members. However, the stages when developers leave the projects are still weakly explored and are not well-defined in existing developers' lifecycle models. In this position paper, we enrich the knowledge about the leaving stage by identifying…
Context: Large-scale distributed projects are typically the results of collective efforts performed by multiple developers with heterogeneous personalities. Objective: We aim to find evidence that personalities can explain developers' behavior in large scale-distributed projects. For example, the propensity to trust others - a critical factor for the success of global software engineering - has been found to influence positively the result of code reviews in distributed projects. Method: In this paper, we perform a quantitative analysis of ecosystem-level data from the code commits and email m…
The maintenance and evolution of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects demand the constant attraction of core developers. In this paper, we report the results of a survey with 52 developers, who recently became core contributors of popular GitHub projects. We reveal their motivations to assume a key role in FLOSS projects (e.g., improving the projects because they are also using it), the project characteristics that most helped in their engagement process (e.g., a friendly community), and the barriers faced by the surveyed core developers (e.g., lack of time of the project leaders).…
Software evolution is a fundamental process that transcends the realm of technical artifacts and permeates the entire organizational structure of a software project. By means of a longitudinal empirical study of 18 large open-source projects, we examine and discuss the evolutionary principles that govern the coordination of developers. By applying a network-analytic approach, we found that the implicit and self-organizing structure of developer coordination is ubiquitously described by non-random organizational principles that defy conventional software-engineering wisdom. In particular, we fo…
Expertise-Based Developer Assignment for Long-Term Software Components in Open-Source Projects
Zayed University（扎耶德大学）；University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences（国家计算机与新兴科学大学）；Heriot-Watt University（赫瑞-瓦特大学）
The availability of open-source projects facilitates developers to contribute and collaborate on a wide range of projects. As a result, the developer community contributing to such open-source projects is also increasing. Many of the projects involve frequent updates and extensive reuses. A well-updated documentation helps in a better understanding of the software project and also facilitates efficient contribution and reuse. Though software documentation plays an important role in the development and maintenance of software, it also suffers from various issues that include insufficiency, inco…
When developing software, it is vitally important to keep the level of technical debt down since it is well established from several studies that technical debt can, e.g., lower the development productivity, decrease the developers' morale, and compromise the overall quality of the software. However, even if researchers and practitioners working in today's software development industry are quite familiar with the concept of technical debt and its related negative consequences, there has been no empirical research focusing specifically on how software managers actively communicate and manage th…
Many software developers rely on open source software for developing their applications and writing their source codes. Measuring an independent project's overall productivity is still an open problem for many technology companies. In this project, we address to bridge the gap of analyzing which are the most important features for prediction of a productivity based system. We have chosen to collect data from GitHub via their application programming interfaces (API) and analyze the data we gathered to understand the relation between the average time to close an issue and the features that we co…
Knowledge about the roles developers play in a software project is crucial to understanding the project's collaborative dynamics. Developers are often classified according to the dichotomy of core and peripheral roles. Typically, operationalizations based on simple counts of developer activities (e.g., number of commits) are used for this purpose, but there is concern regarding their validity and ability to elicit meaningful insights. To shed light on this issue, we investigate whether commonly used operationalizations of core--peripheral roles produce consistent results, and we validate them …
Open-source code development has become widespread in recent years. As a result, open-source software platforms have also become popular, and millions of developers from diverse locations are able to contribute to the same projects. On these platforms, various knowledge about them is obtained from user activity. This information is used in the form of developer metrics to solve a variety of challenges. In this study, we proposed new developer metrics, including commenting and issue-related activity, that require less information. We concluded that commenting on any feature of a project can be …
Architecture information is vital for Open Source Software (OSS) development, and mailing list is one of the widely used channels for developers to share and communicate architecture information. This work investigates the nature of architecture information communication (i.e., why, who, when, and what) by OSS developers via developer mailing lists. We employed a multiple case study approach to extract and analyze the architecture information communication from the developer mailing lists of two OSS projects, ArgoUML and Hibernate, during their development life-cycle of over 18 years. Our main…
Effort estimation models are a fundamental tool in software management, and used as a forecast for resources, constraints and costs associated to software development. For Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) projects, effort estimation is especially complex: professional developers work alongside occasional, volunteer developers, so the overall effort (in person-months) becomes non-trivial to determine. The objective of this work it to develop a simple effort estimation model for FOSS projects, based on the historic data of developers' effort. The model is fed with direct developer feedback to en…
Background: Open source software has an increasing importance in modern software development. However, there is also a growing concern on the sustainability of such projects, which are usually managed by a small number of developers, frequently working as volunteers. Aims: In this paper, we propose an approach to identify GitHub projects that are not actively maintained. Our goal is to alert users about the risks of using these projects and possibly motivate other developers to assume the maintenance of the projects. Method: We train machine learning models to identify unmaintained or sparsely…
Several Open Source Software (OSS) projects depend on the continuity of their development communities to remain sustainable. Understanding how developers become inactive or why they take breaks can help communities prevent abandonment and incentivize developers to come back. In this paper, we propose a novel method to identify developers' inactive periods by analyzing the individual rhythm of contributions to the projects. Using this method, we quantitatively analyze the inactivity of core developers in 18 OSS organizations hosted on GitHub. We also survey core developers to receive their feed…
Although architecture instability has been studied and measured using a variety of metrics, a deeper analysis of which project parts are less stable and how such instability varies over time is still needed. While having more information on architecture instability is, in general, useful for any software development project, it is especially important in Open Source Software (OSS) projects where the supervision of the development process is more difficult to achieve. In particular, we are interested when OSS projects grow from a small controlled environment (i.e., the cathedral phase) to a com…
The blockchain technology has potential applications in various areas such as smart-contracts, Internet of Things (IoT), land registry, supply chain management, storing medical data, and identity management. Although the Github currently hosts more than six thousand active Blockchain software (BCS) projects, few software engineering research has investigated these projects and its' contributors. Although the number of BCS projects is growing rapidly, the motivations, challenges, and needs of BCS developers remain a puzzle. Therefore, the primary objective of this study is to understand the mot…
Studies over the past decade demonstrated that developers contributing to open source software systems tend to self-organize in "emerging" communities. This latent community structure has a significant impact on software quality. While several approaches address the analysis of developer interaction networks, the question of whether these emerging communities align with the developer teams working on various subsystems remains unanswered. Work on socio-technical congruence implies that people that work on the same task or artifact need to coordinate and thus communicate, potentially forming st…
Predictive models for software projects' characteristics have been traditionally based on project-level metrics, employing only little developer-level information, or none at all. In this work we suggest novel metrics that capture temporal and semantic developer-level information collected on a per developer basis. To address the scalability challenges involved in computing these metrics for each and every developer for a large number of source code repositories, we have built a designated repository mining platform. This platform was used to create a metrics dataset based on processing nearly…
Context: Prior research has established that a few individuals generally dominate project communication and source code changes during software development, regardless of task assignments at project initiation. Objective: While this phenomenon has been noted, prior research has not sought to understand these dominant individuals. Previous work has found that core communicators are the gatekeepers of their teams' knowledge, and the performance of these members was correlated with their teams' success. Building on this work, we have employed a longitudinal approach to study the way core develope…
Background: Evolution of open source projects frequently depends on a small number of core developers. The loss of such core developers might be detrimental for projects and even threaten their entire continuation. However, it is possible that new core developers assume the project maintenance and allow the project to survive. Aims: The objective of this paper is to provide empirical evidence on: 1) the frequency of project abandonment and survival, 2) the differences between abandoned and surviving projects, and 3) the motivation and difficulties faced when assuming an abandoned project. Meth…
To build secure software, developers often work together during software development and maintenance to find, fix, and prevent security vulnerabilities. Examining the nature of developer interactions during their security activities regarding security introducing and fixing activities can provide insights for improving current practices. In this work, we conduct a large-scale empirical study to characterize and understand developers' interactions during their security activities regarding security introducing and fixing, which involves more than 16K security fixing commits and over 28K securit…
Given the increasing number of unsuccessful pull requests in GitHub projects, insights into the success and failure of these requests are essential for the developers. In this paper, we provide a comparative study between successful and unsuccessful pull requests made to 78 GitHub base projects by 20,142 developers from 103,192 forked projects. In the study, we analyze pull request discussion texts, project specific information (e.g., domain, maturity), and developer specific information (e.g., experience) in order to report useful insights, and use them to contrast between successful and unsu…
Context: The video game industry is a billion dollar industry that faces problems in the way games are developed. One method to address these problems is using developer aid tools, such as Recommendation Systems. These tools assist developers by generating recommendations to help them perform their tasks. Objective: This article describes a systematic approach to recommend development processes for video game projects, using postmortem knowledge extraction and a model of the context of the new project, in which "postmortems" are articles written by video game developers at the end of projects,…
In the literature, there is a rather clear segregation between manually written tests by developers and automatically generated ones. In this paper, we explore a third solution: to automatically improve existing test cases written by developers. We present the concept, design, and implementation of a system called \dspot, that takes developer-written test cases as input (junit tests in Java) and synthesizes improved versions of them as output. Those test improvements are given back to developers as patches or pull requests, that can be directly integrated in the main branch of the test code ba…
Software bots fulfill an important role in collective software development, and their adoption by developers promises increased productivity. Past research has identified that bots that communicate too often can irritate developers, which affects the utility of the bot. However, it is not clear what other properties of human-bot collaboration affect developers' preferences, or what impact these properties might have. The main idea of this paper is to explore characteristics affecting developer preferences for interactions between humans and bots, in the context of GitHub pull requests. We carr…
Refactoring is widely recognized as one of the efficient techniques to manage technical debt and maintain a healthy software project through enforcing best design practices or coping with design defects. Previous refactoring surveys have shown that code refactoring activities are mainly executed by developers who have sufficient knowledge of the system's design and disposing of leadership roles in their development teams. However, these surveys were mainly limited to specific projects and companies. In this paper, we explore the generalizability of the previous results by analyzing 800 open-so…
Forking-based development has made it easier and straightforward for developers to contribute to open-source software (OSS). Developers can fork an existing project and add changes in their local version without interrupting the development process in the main project. Despite the efficiency of OSS, more than 80% of the projects are not sustainable. Identifying the elements related to OSS success can enlighten developers regarding the sustainability of a project. In our study, we explore whether or not the inefficiencies which arise due to forking-based development like redundant development, …
Unit testing is an essential component of the software development life-cycle. A developer could easily and quickly catch and fix software faults introduced in the source code by creating and running unit tests. Despite their importance, unit tests are subject to bad design or implementation decisions, the so-called test smells. These might decrease software systems quality from various aspects, making it harder to understand, more complex to maintain, and more prone to errors and bugs. Many studies discuss the likely effects of test smells on test code. However, there is a lack of studies tha…
Despite being an old language feature, Java exception handling code is one of the least understood parts of many systems. Several studies have analyzed the characteristics of exception handling code, trying to identify common practices or even link such practices to software bugs. Few works, however, have investigated exception handling issues from the point of view of developers. None of the works have focused on discovering exception handling guidelines adopted by current systems -- which are likely to be a driver of common practices. In this work, we conducted a qualitative study based on s…
Background: Multitasking is usual in software development. It is the ability to stop working on a task, switch to another, and return eventually to the first one, as needed or as scheduled. Multitasking, however, comes at a cognitive cost: frequent context-switches can lead to distraction, sub-standard work, and even greater stress. Aims: This paper reports a replication experiment where we gathered data on a group of developers from a software development company from industry on a large collection of projects stored in GitLab repositories. Method: We reused the developed models and methods f…
New ways of working such as globally distributed development or the integration of self-motivated external developers into software ecosystems will require a better and more comprehensive understanding of developers' feelings, perceptions, motivations and identification with their tasks in their respective project environments. User experience is a concept that captures how persons feel about products, systems and services. It evolved from disciplines such as interaction design and usability to a much richer scope that includes feelings, motivations, and satisfaction. Similarly, developer expe…
Code summarization generates brief natural language descriptions of source code pieces, which can assist developers in understanding code and reduce documentation workload. Recent neural models on code summarization are trained and evaluated on large-scale multi-project datasets consisting of independent code-summary pairs. Despite the technical advances, their effectiveness on a specific project is rarely explored. In practical scenarios, however, developers are more concerned with generating high-quality summaries for their working projects. And these projects may not maintain sufficient doc…
The growing availability of open source projects has facilitated developers to reuse existing software artifacts and leverage them to develop new software. However, it is hard to understand the notion of similarity as it varies from developer to developer. Some developers might search for repositories with similar source code, while some might be in search of repositories with similar requirements or issues. Existing approaches tend to find similar projects by comparing similar artifacts such as source-code to source-code, API usage to API usage, documentation to documentation, and so on. Even…
Software developers are social creatures: they communicate, collaborate, and promote their work in a variety of channels. Twitter, GitHub, Stack Overflow, and other platforms offer developers opportunities to network and exchange ideas. Researchers analyze content on these sites to learn about trends and topics in software engineering. However, insight mined from the text of Stack Overflow questions or GitHub issues is highly focused on detailed and technical aspects of software development. In this paper, we present a relatively new online community for software developers called DEV. On DEV …
Developer social networks (DSNs) are a tool for the analysis of community structures and collaborations between developers in software projects and software ecosystems. Within this paper, we present the results of a systematic mapping study on the use of DSNs in software engineering research. We identified 255 primary studies on DSNs. We mapped the primary studies to research directions, collected information about the data sources and the size of the studies, and conducted a bibliometric assessment. We found that nearly half of the research investigates the structure of developer communities.…
As collaborative coding environments make it easier to contribute to software projects, the number of developers involved in these projects keeps increasing. This increase makes it more difficult for code reviewers to deal with buggy contributions. Collaborative environments like GitHub provide a rich source of data on developers' contributions. Such data can be used to extract information about developers regarding technical (e.g., their experience) and social (e.g., their interactions) factors. Recent studies analyzed the influence of these factors on different activities of software develop…
GitHub Sponsors, launched in 2019, enables donations to individual open source software (OSS) developers. Financial support for OSS maintainers and developers is a major issue in terms of sustaining OSS projects, and the ability to donate to individuals is expected to support the sustainability of developers, projects, and community. In this work, we conducted a mixed-methods study of GitHub Sponsors, including quantitative and qualitative analyses, to understand the characteristics of developers who are likely to receive donations and what developers think about donations to individuals. We f…
Background: Accurate representation of developer expertise has always been an important research problem. While a number of studies proposed novel methods of representing expertise within individual projects, these methods are difficult to apply at an ecosystem level. However, with the focus of software development shifting from monolithic to modular, a method of representing developers' expertise in the context of the entire OSS development becomes necessary when, for example, a project tries to find new maintainers and look for developers with relevant skills. Aim: We aim to address this kno…
Personality traits influence most, if not all, of the human activities, from those as natural as the way people walk, talk, dress and write to those most complex as the way they interact with others. Most importantly, personality influences the way people make decisions including, in the case of developers, the criteria they consider when selecting a software project they want to participate. Most of the works that study the influence of social, technical and human factors in software development projects have been focused on the impact of communications in software quality. For instance, on i…
The open source development model has become a paradigm shift from traditional in-house/closed-source software development model, with many successes. Traditionally, open source projects were characterized essentially by their individual volunteer developers. Such tradition has changed significantly with the participation of many organizations in particular. However, there exists a knowledge gap concerning how open source developer communities evolve. In this paper, we present some observations on open source developer communities. In particular, we analyze git repositories of 20 well-known op…
In large and active software projects, it becomes impractical for a developer to stay aware of all project activity. While it might not be necessary to know about each commit or issue, it is arguably important to know about the ones that are unusual. To investigate this hypothesis, we identified unusual events in 200 GitHub projects using a comprehensive list of ways in which an artifact can be unusual and asked 140 developers responsible for or affected by these events to comment on the usefulness of the corresponding information. Based on 2,096 answers, we identify the subset of unusual even…
Continuous integration is a software engineering practice of frequently merging all developer working copies with a shared main branch, e.g., several times a day. With the advent of GitHub, a platform well known for its "social coding" features that aid collaboration and sharing, and currently the largest code host in the open source world, collaborative software development has never been more prominent. In GitHub development one can distinguish between two types of developer contributions to a project: direct ones, coming from a typically small group of developers with write access to the ma…
