Social Diversity and Growth Levels of Open Source Software Projects on GitHub

Joop Aué, Michiel Haisma, Kristín Fjóla Tómasdóttir, Alberto Bacchelli

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

20 Citations (Scopus)
154 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Background: Projects of all sizes and impact are leveraging the services of the social coding platform GitHub to collaborate. Since users' information and actions are recorded, GitHub has been mined for over 6 years now to investigate aspects of the collaborative open source software (OSS) development paradigm. Aim: In this research, we use this data to investigate the relation between project growth as a proxy for success, and social diversity. Method: We first categorize active OSS projects into a five-star rating using a benchmarking system we based on various project growth metrics; then we study the relation between this rating and the reported social diversities for the team members of those projects. Results: Our findings highlight a statistically significant relation; however, the effect is small. Conclusions: Our findings suggest the need for further research on this topic; moreover, the proposed benchmarking method may be used in future work to determine OSS project success on collaboration platforms such as GitHub.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 10th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, ESEM 2016
Place of PublicationNew York, NY
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Pages1-6
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-4503-4427-2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 8 Sept 2016
Event10th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, ESEM 2016 - Ciudad Real, Spain
Duration: 8 Sept 20169 Sept 2016

Conference

Conference10th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, ESEM 2016
Country/TerritorySpain
CityCiudad Real
Period8/09/169/09/16

Keywords

  • GitHub
  • social diversity
  • software project growth

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