What’s in a GitHub Star? Understanding Repository Starring Practices in a Social Coding Platform

Borges, Hudson Silva; Valente, M.

doi:10.1016/j.jss.2018.09.016

Cited by 218 publications

(111 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…The above phenomena may impact reproducibility of research studies if the population of software libraries under analysis is retrieved using a single metric of popularity (e.g., [7] analysed the top 5,000 GitHub projects based on their number of stars). Other popularity metrics may lead to different research findings, limiting the generalisability of the results.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Diversity of Software Package Popularity Metrics: An Empirical Study of npm

Zerouali¹,

Mens²,

Robles

et al. 2019

2019 IEEE 26th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)

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Software systems often leverage on open source software libraries to reuse functionalities. Such libraries are readily available through software package managers like npm for JavaScript. Due to the huge amount of packages available in such package distributions, developers often decide to rely on or contribute to a software package based on its popularity. Moreover, it is a common practice for researchers to depend on popularity metrics for data sampling and choosing the right candidates for their studies. However, the meaning of popularity is relative and can be defined and measured in a diversity of ways, that might produce different outcomes even when considered for the same studies. In this paper, we show evidence of how different is the meaning of popularity in software engineering research. Moreover, we empirically analyse the relationship between different software popularity measures. As a case study, for a large dataset of 175k npm packages, we computed and extracted 9 different popularity metrics from three open source tracking systems: libraries.io, npmjs.com and GitHub. We found that indeed popularity can be measured with different unrelated metrics, each metric can be defined within a specific context. This indicates a need for a generic framework that would use a portfolio of popularity metrics drawing from different concepts.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Diversity of Software Package Popularity Metrics: An Empirical Study of npm

Zerouali¹,

Mens²,

Robles

et al. 2019

2019 IEEE 26th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…breaking up exclusionary structures) [26:299]. In this framing of openness, Schlagwien et al [26] WikiTribune shares characteristics with other production communities like GitHub (a digital workspace for the production of software and nonsoftware digital artifacts [5,24]) and Wikipedia (a non-profit wiki-based global encyclopedia), however, the way in which the various open principles manifest and are enacted differ across projects. We consider WikiTribune a "hybrid" model because it is a for-profit organization that hires and manages paid professionals to produce content (unlike GitHub and Wikipedia), but also opens up the production of its product to anyone that wants to join and the consumption of its product to anyone that visits the website (unlike more traditional organizations [9]), open source development (e.g.…”

Section: Characterizing Wikitribune's Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Theorizing Hybrid Models of Peer Production: A Case Study of an Open Collaborative Journalism Platform

O’Riordan¹,

Feller²,

Kiely³

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

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Peer production communities (c.f. Benkler 2002) are typified by principles of access to resources, inclusive participation, transparency of action, and democratic work. However, the ways in which they operate and evolve depend on various infrastructural and governance mechanisms. Literature suggests that there are three key challenges to overcome in building and sustaining a community that produces open knowledge goods, namely motivation (incentives for participation), coordination (efficient organization of work), and integration (effective creation of high quality end products). We present a theoretical framework to analyze case study findings from the WikiTribune project, a "hybrid" model of peer production. This project is characterized as an open collaborative journalism model that combines elements of commercial firm-based production with that of commons-based peer production. The framework identifies factors affecting hybrid models and the impact on community and resource development.

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“…Also, some researchers investigated other features and tools of GitHub, eg, forking, starring, watching, and Gists . Specifically, Jiang et al explored the forking in GitHub and found that forking is mainly used for making contributions of original repositories, and it is beneficial for OSS community.…”

Section: Preliminariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Specifically, Jiang et al explored the forking in GitHub and found that forking is mainly used for making contributions of original repositories, and it is beneficial for OSS community. Borges et al presented a thorough study on the GitHub stars. They conducted an analysis on the top‐5000 most starred GitHub repositories and proposed four patterns to describe stars growth.…”

Section: Preliminariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

GitHub's milestone tool: A mixed‐methods analysis on its use

Zhang

Wang

et al. 2019

J Software Evolu Process

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Social coding site GitHub provides developers with many management tools to facilitate project maintenance and developer collaboration. Milestone tool, in particular, plays an important role in organizing and tracking progress on groups of issues or pull requests in a project. However, few research has analyzed the milestone tool, even though it has been used in practice for a long time. In this paper, we want to address this literature gap and present an ongoing work aimed at investigating the use of the milestone tool in GitHub open‐source projects. We conduct a mixed‐methods analysis in a large‐scale dataset of GitHub projects, to help developers gain some insights into the milestone tool, including its usage, benefits, and limitations. We quantitatively investigate the basic adoption of milestone tool and its correlation with project properties. We also survey developers to understand the reasons for using milestone tool or not and their perceptions of the milestone tool. We find that certain types of projects use milestone tool more than others. Adopting the milestone tool is associated with more commits, more releases, and more project popularity, but the current milestone tool also has some limitations. These observations can then be forwarded to the GitHub community for follow‐up and can result in them potentially making a better milestone tool.

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What’s in a GitHub Star? Understanding Repository Starring Practices in a Social Coding Platform

Cited by 218 publications

References 55 publications

On the Diversity of Software Package Popularity Metrics: An Empirical Study of npm

On the Diversity of Software Package Popularity Metrics: An Empirical Study of npm

Theorizing Hybrid Models of Peer Production: A Case Study of an Open Collaborative Journalism Platform

GitHub's milestone tool: A mixed‐methods analysis on its use

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