GitHub projects can be easily replicated through the site's fork process or through a Git clone-push sequence. This is a problem for empirical software engineering, because it can lead to skewed results or mistrained machine learning models. We provide a dataset of 10.6 million GitHub projects that are copies of others, and link each record with the project's ultimate parent. The ultimate parents were derived from a ranking along six metrics. The related projects were calculated as the connected components of an 18.2 million node and 12 million edge denoised graph created by directing edges to ultimate parents. The graph was created by filtering out more than 30 hand-picked and 2.3 million pattern-matched clumping projects. Projects that introduced unwanted clumping were identified by repeatedly visualizing shortest path distances between unrelated important projects. Our dataset identified 30 thousand duplicate projects in an existing popular reference dataset of 1.8 million projects. An evaluation of our dataset against another created independently with different methods found a significant overlap, but also differences attributed to the operational definition of what projects are considered as related.
Given the vast number of repositories hosted on GitHub, project discovery and retrieval have become increasingly important for GitHub users. Repository descriptions serve as one of the first points of contact for users who are accessing a repository. However, repository owners often fail to provide a high-quality description; instead, they use vague terms, the purpose of the repository is poorly explained, or the description is omitted entirely. In this work, we examine the current practice of writing GitHub repository descriptions. Our investigation leads to the proposal of the LSP (Language,…
Developers use and contribute to repositories on GitHub. Documentation present in the repositories serves as an important source by helping developers to understand, maintain and contribute to the project. Currently, documentation in a repository is diversified, among various files, with most of it present in ReadMe files. However, other software artifacts in the repository, such as issue reports and pull requests could also contribute to documentation, without documentation being explicitly specified. Hence, in this paper, we propose a taxonomy of documentation sources by analyzing different …
Besides a git-based version control system, GitHub integrates several social coding features. Particularly, GitHub users can star a repository, presumably to manifest interest or satisfaction with an open source project. However, the real and practical meaning of starring a project was never the subject of an in-depth and well-founded empirical investigation. Therefore, we provide in this paper a throughout study on the meaning, characteristics, and dynamic growth of GitHub stars. First, by surveying 791 developers, we report that three out of four developers consider the number of stars befor…
Organ transplantation, which is the utilization of codes directly related to some specific functionalities to complete ones own program, provides more convenience for developers than traditional component reuse. However, recent techniques are challenged with the lack of organs for transplantation. Hence, we conduct an empirical study on extracting organs from GitHub repository to explore transplantation based on large-scale dataset. We analyze statistics from 12 representative GitHub projects and get the conclusion that 1) there are abundant practical organs existing in commits with add as a k…
README files play an essential role in shaping a developer's first impression of a software repository and in documenting the software project that the repository hosts. Yet, we lack a systematic understanding of the content of a typical README file as well as tools that can process these files automatically. To close this gap, we conduct a qualitative study involving the manual annotation of 4,226 README file sections from 393 randomly sampled GitHub repositories and we design and evaluate a classifier and a set of features that can categorize these sections automatically. We find that inform…
Outdated documentation is a pervasive problem in software development, preventing effective use of software, and misleading users and developers alike. We posit that one possible reason why documentation becomes out of sync so easily is that developers are unaware of when their source code modifications render the documentation obsolete. Ensuring that the documentation is always in sync with the source code takes considerable effort, especially for large codebases. To address this situation, we propose an approach that can automatically detect code element references that survive in the docume…
GitHub is the largest source code repository in the world. It provides a git-based source code management platform and also many features inspired by social networks. For example, GitHub users can show appreciation to projects by adding stars to them. Therefore, the number of stars of a repository is a direct measure of its popularity. In this paper, we use multiple linear regressions to predict the number of stars of GitHub repositories. These predictions are useful both to repository owners and clients, who usually want to know how their projects are performing in a competitive open source d…
Given the rapid growth of Open-Source Software (OSS) projects, ethical considerations are becoming more important. Past studies focused on specific ethical issues (e.g., gender bias and fairness in OSS). There is little to no study on the different types of unethical behavior in OSS projects. We present the first study of unethical behavior in OSS projects from the stakeholders' perspective. Our study of 316 GitHub issues provides a taxonomy of 15 types of unethical behavior guided by six ethical principles (e.g., autonomy).Examples of new unethical behavior include soft forking (copying a rep…
In collaborative social development platforms such as GitHub, forking a repository is a common activity. A variant fork wants to split the development from the original repository and grow towards a different direction. In this preliminary exploratory research, we analyze the possible reasons for creating a variant fork in blockchain-oriented software. By collecting repositories in GitHub, we created a dataset with repositories and their variants, from which we manually analyzed 86 variants. Based on the variants we studied, the main reason to create a variant in blockchain-oriented software i…
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…
HTW University of Applied Sciences（HTW应用科学大学）；University of Guilan（吉兰大学）；Pitzer College（皮策学院）；University Hospital Bonn（波恩大学医院）；University of Southampton（南安普顿大学）
Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) replaced conventional software systems in various domains such as machine translation, natural language processing, and image processing. So, why do we need an repository for artificial neural networks? Those systems are developed with labeled data and we have strong dependencies between the data that is used for training and testing our network. Another challenge is the data quality as well as reuse-ability. There we are trying to apply concepts from classic software engineering that is not limited to the model, while data and code haven't been dealt with mos…
How can we identify similar repositories and clusters among a large online archive, such as GitHub? Determiningrepository similarity is an essential building block in studying the dynamics and the evolution of such software ecosystems. The key challenge is to determine the right representation for the diverse repository features in a way that: (a) it captures all aspects of the available information, and (b) it is readily usable by MLalgorithms. We propose Repo2Vec, a comprehensive embedding approach to represent a repository as a distributed vector by combining features from three types of in…
Forking is a common practice for developers when building upon on already existing projects. These forks create variants, which have a common code base but then evolve the code in different directions, which is specific to that forked project requirements. An interesting side-effect of having multiple forks is the ability to select between different evolution directions of the code which is based on developers fixing bugs in the code base. However, the key issue that this decentralized form of information is difficult to analyze. In this study, we propose a visualization to analyze active chan…
LLM-based Content Classification Approach for GitHub Repositories by the README Files
Department of Computing and Built Environment（计算与环境系）；Birmingham City University（伯明翰城市大学）；Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering（计算机科学与软件工程系）；School of Engineering（工程学院）；Penn State University, Behrend, Erie PA（宾夕法尼亚州立大学贝伦分校，埃里普斯帕州）；Department of Electrical Engineering（电气工程系）；UET Taxila（塔希尔工程大学）
This work presents an approach for using GitHub classroom as a shared, structured, and persistent repository to support project-based courses at the Software Engineering Undergraduate program at PUC Minas, in Brazil. We discuss the needs of the different stakeholders that guided the development of the approach. Results on the perceptions of professors and students show that the approach brings benefits. Besides the lessons learned, we present insights on improving the education of the next generation of software engineers by employing metrics to monitor skill development, verifying student wor…
Kotlin is a novel language that represents an alternative to Java, and has been recently adopted as a first-class programming language for Android applications. Kotlin is achieving a significant diffusion among developers, and several studies have highlighted various advantages of the language when compared to Java. The objective of this paper is to analyze a set of open-source Android apps, to evaluate their transition to the Kotlin programming language throughout their lifespan and understand whether the adoption of Kotlin has impacts on the success of Android apps. We mined all the projects…
Massive data from software repositories and collaboration tools are widely used to study social aspects in software development. One question that several recent works have addressed is how a software project's size and structure influence team productivity, a question famously considered in Brooks' law. Recent studies using massive repository data suggest that developers in larger teams tend to be less productive than smaller teams. Despite using similar methods and data, other studies argue for a positive linear or even super-linear relationship between team size and productivity, thus conte…
Git is used as the distributed version control system for many open-source software projects. One Git-based service, GitHub, is the most common code hosting and repository service for open-source software projects. For researchers that study software engineering, the content that is hosted on these platforms provides much valuable data. There are some alternatives to get GitHub data such as GitHub Archive, GitHub API or GHTorrent. Among these options, GHTorrent is the most widely known and used GitHub dataset in the literature. Although there are some review studies about software engineering …
GitHub is a popular data repository for code examples. It is being continuously used to train several AI-based tools to automatically generate code. However, the effectiveness of such tools in correctly demonstrating the usage of cryptographic APIs has not been thoroughly assessed. In this paper, we investigate the extent and severity of misuses, specifically caused by incorrect cryptographic API call sequences in GitHub. We also analyze the suitability of GitHub data to train a learning-based model to generate correct cryptographic API call sequences. For this, we manually extracted and analy…
