"May the fork be with you": novel metrics to analyze collaboration on GitHub

Title"May the fork be with you": novel metrics to analyze collaboration on GitHub
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2014
AuthorsBiazzini, M, Baudry, B
Tertiary AuthorsCounsell, S, Marchesi, ML, Visaggio, A, Zhang, H, Venkatasubramanyam, R
Secondary TitleProceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics - WETSoM 2014
Pagination37 - 43
PublisherACM Press
Place PublishedNew York, New York, USA
ISBN Number9781450328548
Keywordsflossmole, github
Abstract

Multi–repository software projects are becoming more and
more popular, thanks to web–based facilities such as GitHub.
Code and process metrics generally assume a single repository
must be analyzed, in order to measure the characteristics
of a codebase. Thus they are not apt to measure how
much relevant information is hosted in multiple repositories
contributing to the same codebase. Nor can they feature
the characteristics of such a distributed development process.
We present a set of novel metrics, based on an original
classification of commits, conceived to capture some interesting
aspects of a multi–repository development process. We
also describe an efficient way to build a data structure that
allows to compute these metrics on a set of Git repositories.
Interesting outcomes, obtained by applying our metrics
on a large sample of projects hosted on GitHub, show the
usefulness of our contribution.

Notes

"According to FLOSSmole [8] (Free Libre OpenSource Software)
statistics, GitHub had 191765 repositories publicly
available at May 2012."

URLhttp://marbiaz.github.io/docs/Biazzini14b.pdf
DOI10.1145/2593868.2593875
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