Using GitHub as a Teaching Tool for Programming Courses

GitHub has become the most popular code management platform in the software development industry. It allows developers to manage their software development projects and collaborate with each other. Recently, educators also started using GitHub as a teaching tool for programming courses by hosting code samples and managing student assignments. In this study, we examine how GitHub is being used in academia, and we discuss the motivations and the benefits of using this platform. We also present authors’ experience of using GitHub in programming courses of a software engineering program. We discuss the benefits and challenges of using GitHub and GitHub classroom in the classroom.Cockrell School of Engineerin

Healthy or Not: A Way to Predict Ecosystem Health in GitHub

With the development of open source community, through the interaction of developers, the collaborative development of software, and the sharing of software tools, the formation of open source software ecosystem has matured. Natural ecosystems provide ecological services on which human beings depend. Maintaining a healthy natural ecosystem is a necessity for the sustainable development of mankind. Similarly, maintaining a healthy ecosystem of open source software is also a prerequisite for the sustainable development of open source communities, such as GitHub. This paper takes GitHub as an example to analyze the health condition of open source ecosystem and, also, it is a research area in Symmetry. Firstly, the paper presents the healthy definition of GitHub open source ecosystem health and, then, according to the main components of natural ecosystem health, the paper proposes the health indicators and health indicators evaluation method. Based on the above, the GitHub ecosystem health prediction method is proposed. By analyzing the projects and data collected in GitHub, it is found that, using the proposed evaluation indicators and method, we can analyze the healthy development trend of the GitHub ecosystem and contribute to the stability of ecosystem development

Identifying Unmaintained Projects in GitHub

Background: Open source software has an increasing importance in modern software development. However, there is also a growing concern on the sustainability of such projects, which are usually managed by a small number of developers, frequently working as volunteers. Aims: In this paper, we propose an approach to identify GitHub projects that are not actively maintained. Our goal is to alert users about the risks of using these projects and possibly motivate other developers to assume the maintenance of the projects. Method: We train machine learning models to identify unmaintained or sparsely maintained projects, based on a set of features about project activity (commits, forks, issues, etc). We empirically validate the model with the best performance with the principal developers of 129 GitHub projects. Results: The proposed machine learning approach has a precision of 80%, based on the feedback of real open source developers; and a recall of 96%. We also show that our approach can be used to assess the risks of projects becoming unmaintained. Conclusions: The model proposed in this paper can be used by open source users and developers to identify GitHub projects that are not actively maintained anymore.Comment: Accepted at 12th International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), 10 pages, 201

Unusual Events in GitHub Repositories

In large and active software projects, it becomes impractical for a developer to stay aware of all project activity. While it might not be necessary to know about each commit or issue, it is arguably important to know about the ones that are unusual. To investigate this hypothesis, we identified unusual events in 200 GitHub projects using a comprehensive list of ways in which an artifact can be unusual and asked 140 developers responsible for or affected by these events to comment on the usefulness of the corresponding information. Based on 2,096 answers, we identify the subset of unusual events that developers consider particularly useful, including large code modifications and unusual amounts of reviewing activity, along with qualitative evidence on the reasons behind these answers. Our findings provide a means for reducing the amount of information that developers need to parse in order to stay up to date with development activity in their projects.Comment: Accepted for publication in Journal of Systems and Softwar