50,243 research outputs found
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
We Don't Need Another Hero? The Impact of "Heroes" on Software Development
A software project has "Hero Developers" when 80% of contributions are
delivered by 20% of the developers. Are such heroes a good idea? Are too many
heroes bad for software quality? Is it better to have more/less heroes for
different kinds of projects? To answer these questions, we studied 661 open
source projects from Public open source software (OSS) Github and 171 projects
from an Enterprise Github.
We find that hero projects are very common. In fact, as projects grow in
size, nearly all project become hero projects. These findings motivated us to
look more closely at the effects of heroes on software development. Analysis
shows that the frequency to close issues and bugs are not significantly
affected by the presence of project type (Public or Enterprise). Similarly, the
time needed to resolve an issue/bug/enhancement is not affected by heroes or
project type. This is a surprising result since, before looking at the data, we
expected that increasing heroes on a project will slow down howfast that
project reacts to change. However, we do find a statistically significant
association between heroes, project types, and enhancement resolution rates.
Heroes do not affect enhancement resolution rates in Public projects. However,
in Enterprise projects, the more heroes increase the rate at which project
complete enhancements.
In summary, our empirical results call for a revision of a long-held truism
in software engineering. Software heroes are far more common and valuable than
suggested by the literature, particularly for medium to large Enterprise
developments. Organizations should reflect on better ways to find and retain
more of these heroesComment: 8 pages + 1 references, Accepted to International conference on
Software Engineering - Software Engineering in Practice, 201
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Similarities, challenges and opportunities of wikipedia content and open source projects
Copyright @ 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Several years of research and evidence have demonstrated that Open Source Software (OSS) portals often contain a large amount of software projects that simply do not evolve, developed by relatively small communities, struggling to attract a sustained number of contributors. These portals have started to
increasingly act as a storage for abandoned projects, and researchers and practitioners should try and point out how to take advantage of such content. Similarly, other online content portals (like Wikipedia) could be harvested for valuable content. In this paper we argue that, even with differences in the requested expertise, many projects reliant on content and contributions by users undergo a similar evolution, and follow similar patterns: when a project fails to attract contributors, it appears to be not evolving, or abandoned. Far from a negative finding, even those projects could provide valuable content that should be harvested and identified based on common characteristics: by using the attributes of “usefulness” and “modularity” we isolate valuable content in both Wikipedia pages and OSS projects
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