Why and how developers fork what from whom in GitHub

Jiang, Jing; Lo, David; He, Jiahuan; Xia, Xin; Kochhar, Pavneet Singh; Zhang, Li

doi:10.1007/s10664-016-9436-6

Cited by 101 publications

(71 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…We showed that the number of stars follows a highly skewed distribution. Jian et al explore why and how developers fork what from whom in GitHub [12]. They report that some repository owners are popular, and attract many forks; other owners are unpopular and rarely attract forks.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting the Popularity of GitHub Repositories

Borges

Hora

Valente

2016

Proceedings of the the 12th International Conference on Predictive Models and Data Analytics in Software Engineering

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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 development market. In a large-scale analysis, we show that the proposed models start to provide accurate predictions after being trained with the number of stars received in the last six months. Furthermore, specific models-generated using data from repositories that share the same growth trends-are recommended for repositories with slow growth and/or for repositories with less stars. Finally, we evaluate the ability to predict not the number of stars of a repository but its rank among the GitHub repositories. We found a very strong correlation between predicted and real rankings (Spearman's rho greater than 0.95).

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting the Popularity of GitHub Repositories

Borges

Hora

Valente

2016

Proceedings of the the 12th International Conference on Predictive Models and Data Analytics in Software Engineering

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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. Borges et al presented a thorough study on the GitHub stars.…”

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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“…As we can see, most forks are not popular at all. They are probably only used to submit pull requests or to create a copy of a repository, for backup purposes [20]. For example, the third quartile measure is 13 stars.…”

Section: Complementary Investigation: Forksmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recent research on open source has focused on the organization of successful open source projects [29], on how to attract and retain newcomers [6,25,31,35,39], and on specific features provided by GitHub, such as pull requests [13][14][15], forks [20], and stars [4,5].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why modern open source projects fail

Coelho

Valente

2017

Proceedings of the 2017 11th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering

141

100

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Open source is experiencing a renaissance period, due to the appearance of modern platforms and workflows for developing and maintaining public code. As a result, developers are creating open source software at speeds never seen before. Consequently, these projects are also facing unprecedented mortality rates. To better understand the reasons for the failure of modern open source projects, this paper describes the results of a survey with the maintainers of 104 popular GitHub systems that have been deprecated. We provide a set of nine reasons for the failure of these open source projects. We also show that some maintenance practices-specifically the adoption of contributing guidelines and continuous integrationhave an important association with a project failure or success. Finally, we discuss and reveal the principal strategies developers have tried to overcome the failure of the studied projects.

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Why and how developers fork what from whom in GitHub

Cited by 101 publications

References 23 publications

Predicting the Popularity of GitHub Repositories

Predicting the Popularity of GitHub Repositories

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

Why modern open source projects fail

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