Context: The ability to follow other users and projects on GitHub has introduced a new layer of open source software development participants who observe but do not contribute to projects. It has not been fully explored how following others influences the actions of GitHub users. Objective: This papers studies the motivation behind following (or not following) others and the influence of popular users on their followers. Method: A mixed methods research approach was used including a survey of 800 GitHub users to uncover the reasons for following on GitHub and a complementary quantitative analysis of the activity of GitHub users to examine influence. Our quantitative analysis studied 199 popular (most followed) users and their followers. Results: We found that popular users do influence their followers by guiding them to new projects. As a user's popularity increases, so does their rate of influence, yet the same is not true for a popular user's rate of contribution. Conclusions: These results indicate that a new type of leadership is emerging through GitHub's following feature and popularity can be more important than contribution in influencing others. We discuss implications of popularity and influence and their impact on social structure and leadership on OSS projects.
We describe an experience in teaching global software engineering (GSE) using distributed Scrum augmented with industrial best practices. Our unique instructional technique had students work in both same-site and cross-site teams to contrast the two modes of working. The course was a collaboration . Fifteen Canadian and eight Finnish students worked on a single large project, divided into four teams, working on interdependent user stories as negotiated with the industrial product owner located in Finland. Half way through the course, we changed the teams so each student worked in both a local and a distributed team. We studied student learning using a mixedmethod approach including 14 post-course interviews, pre-course and Sprint questionnaires, observations, meeting recordings, and repository data from git and Flowdock, the primary communication tool. Our results show no significant differences between working in distributed vs. non-distributed teams, suggesting that Scrum helps alleviate many GSE problems. Our post-course interviews and survey data allows us to explain this effect; we found that students over time learned to better self-select tasks with less inter-team dependencies, to communicate more, and to work better in teams.
Users on GitHub can watch repositories to receive notifications about project activity. This introduces a new type of passive project membership. In this paper, we investigate the behavior of watchers and their contribution to the projects they watch. We find that a subset of project watchers begin contributing to the project and those contributors account for a significant percentage of contributors on the project. As contributors, watchers are more confident and contribute over a longer period of time in a more varied way than other contributors. This is likely attributable to the knowledge gained through project notifications.
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