An Overview on GITHUB (original) (raw)

Open Source-Style Collaborative Development Practices in Commercial Projects Using GitHub

—Researchers are currently drawn to study projects hosted on GitHub due to its popularity, ease of obtaining data, and its distinctive built-in social features. GitHub has been found to create a transparent development environment, which together with a pull request-based workflow, provides a lightweight mechanism for committing, reviewing and managing code changes. These features impact how GitHub is used and the benefits it provides to teams' development and collaboration. While most of the evidence we have is from GitHub's use in open source software (OSS) projects, GitHub is also used in an increasing number of commercial projects. It is unknown how GitHub supports these projects given that GitHub's workflow model does not intuitively fit the commercial development way of working. In this paper, we report findings from an online survey and interviews with GitHub users on how GitHub is used for collaboration in commercial projects. We found that many commercial projects adopted practices that are more typical of OSS projects including reduced communication, more independent work, and self-organization. We discuss how GitHub's transparency and popular workflow can promote open collaboration, allowing organizations to increase code reuse and promote knowledge sharing across their teams.

On the Popularity of GitHub Applications: A Preliminary Note

GitHub is the world's largest collection of open source software. Therefore, it is important both to software developers and users to compare and track the popularity of GitHub repositories. In this paper, we propose a framework to assess the popularity of GitHub software, using their number of stars. We also propose a set of popularity growth patterns, which describe the evolution of the number of stars of a system over time. We show that stars tend to correlate with other measures, like forks, and with the effective usage of GitHub software by third-party programs.

Open Source Software Development Challenges: A Systematic Literature Review on GitHub

arXiv (Cornell University), 2020

Git is used as the distributed version control system for many open-source software projects. One Git-based service, GitHub, is the most common code hosting and repository service for open-source software projects. For researchers that study software engineering, the content that is hosted on these platforms provides much valuable data. There are some alternatives to get GitHub data such as GitHub Archive, GitHub API or GHTorrent. Among these options, GHTorrent is the most widely known and used GitHub dataset in the literature. Although there are some review studies about software engineering challenges across the GitHub platform, no review of GHTorrent dataset-specific research is available. In this study, the 172 studies that use GHTorrent as a data source were categorized within the scope of open source software development challenges and a systematic literature review was carried out. Moreover, the pros and cons of the dataset have been indicated and the focused issues of the literature on and the open challenges have been noted.

The appropriation of GitHub for curation

2017

GitHub is a widely used online collaborative software development environment. In this paper, we describe curation projects as a new category of GitHub project that collects, evaluates, and preserves resources for software developers. We investigate: (1) what motivates software developers to curate resources; (2) why curation has occurred on GitHub; (3) how curated resources are used by software developers; and (4) how the GitHub platform could better support these practices. We conduct indepth interviews with 16 software developers, each of whom hosts curation projects on GitHub. Our results suggest that the motivators that inspire software developers to curate resources on GitHub are similar to those that motivate them to participate in the development of open source projects. Convenient tools (e.g., Markdown syntax and Git version control system) and the opportunity to address professional needs of a large number of peers attract developers to engage in curation projects on GitHub. Benefits of curating on GitHub include learning opportunities, support for development work, and professional interaction. However, curation is limited by GitHub's document structure, format, and a lack of key features, such as search. In light of this, we propose design possibilities to encourage and improve appropriations of GitHub for curation.

Open source software GitHub ecosystem: a SEM approach

2018

Nobody has been more important to me in the pursuit of this repo than the members of my family. I would like to thank my brothers; whose love and guidance are with me in whatever I pursue. Most importantly, I wish to thank my loving and supportive wife and my three wonderful children, Arwa, Ali and Mustafa, who provide unending inspiration.

Understanding the Factors That Impact the Popularity of GitHub Repositories

2016 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), 2016

Software popularity is a valuable information to modern open source developers, who constantly want to know if their systems are attracting new users, if new releases are gaining acceptance, or if they are meeting user's expectations. In this paper, we describe a study on the popularity of software systems hosted at GitHub, which is the world's largest collection of open source software. GitHub provides an explicit way for users to manifest their satisfaction with a hosted repository: the stargazers button. In our study, we reveal the main factors that impact the number of stars of GitHub projects, including programming language and application domain. We also study the impact of new features on project popularity. Finally, we identify four main patterns of popularity growth, which are derived after clustering the time series representing the number of stars of 2,279 popular GitHub repositories. We hope our results provide valuable insights to developers and maintainers, which could help them on building and evolving systems in a competitive software market.

A topology of groups: What GitHub can tell us about online collaboration

Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2020

In this work, we study the collaboration patterns of open source software projects on GitHub by analyzing the pull request submissions and acceptances of repositories. We develop a group typology based on the structural properties of the corresponding directed graphs, and analyze how the topology is connected to the repositorys collective identity, hierarchy, productivity, popularity, resilience and stability. These analyses indicate significant differences between group types and thereby provide valuable insights on how to effectively organize collaborative software development. Identifying the mechanisms that underlie self-organized collaboration on digital platforms is important not just to better understand open source software development but also all other decentralized and digital work environments, a setting widely regarded as a key feature of the future work place.

GitHub Projects. Quality Analysis of Open-Source Software

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014

Nowadays Open-Source Software is developed mostly by decentralized teams of developers cooperating on-line. GitHub portal is an online social network that supports development of software by virtual teams of programmers. Since there is no central mechanism that governs the process of team formation, it is interesting to investigate if there are any significant correlations between project quality and the characteristics of the team members. However, for such analysis to be possible, we need good metrics of a project quality. This paper develops two such metrics, first one reflecting project's popularity, and the second one-the quality of support offered by team members to users. The first metric is based on the number of 'stars' a project is given by other GitHub members, the second is obtained using survival analysis techniques applied to issues reported on the project by its users. After developing the metrics we have gathered characteristics of several GitHub projects and analyzed their influence on the project quality using statistical regression techniques.

Ten Simple Rules for Taking Advantage of git and GitHub

2016

A ‘Ten Simple Rules’ guide to git and GitHub. We describe and provide examples on how to use these software to track projects, as users, teams and organizations. We document collaborative development using branching and forking, interaction between collaborators using issues and continuous integration and automation using, for example, Travis CI and codevoc. We also describe dissemination and social aspects of GitHub such as GitHub pages, following and watching repositories, and give advice on how to make code citable.