Discovering Digital Siblings: Quantifying Inter-Repository Similarity Through GitHub Dependency Structures

Open Source developers typically use Git repositories to transparently store the source code of projects and contribute to the code of others. There are millions of repositories actively hosted on platforms such as GitHub. This presents an opportunity for sharing knowledge between related projects – the so-called digital siblings. Finding...

Contribution of source code identifiers to GitHub project similarity: Which other GitHub projects are similar to yours?

GitHub is an online platform that hosts millions of projects. Many of these projects have the same topic or share the same goal. Finding similar projects which can be used as role models, inspiration or examples can help developers meet their requirements faster and more efficiently. Previous studies have been successful in finding similar...

Method-Level Data in GitHub Pull Request Descriptions: Effects on Developers' Prioritization and Facilitation of Fixing Vulnerable Dependencies

Modern software development involves the usage of external third-party software projects as direct dependencies. Nonetheless, developers of a dependant project have no control over critical aspects such as development and testing of the dependency. This can put the reliant repositories at risk through vulnerabilities, which can be exploited by...