Social Diversity and Growth Levels of Open Source Software Projects on GitHub
Joop Aué (External organisation)
Michiel Haisma (External organisation)
Kristín Fjóla Tómasdóttir (External organisation)
A Bacchelli (TU Delft - Software Engineering)
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Abstract
Background: Projects of all sizes and impact are leveraging the services of the social coding platform GitHub to collaborate. Since users' information and actions are recorded, GitHub has been mined for over 6 years now to investigate aspects of the collaborative open source software (OSS) development paradigm. Aim: In this research, we use this data to investigate the relation between project growth as a proxy for success, and social diversity. Method: We first categorize active OSS projects into a five-star rating using a benchmarking system we based on various project growth metrics; then we study the relation between this rating and the reported social diversities for the team members of those projects. Results: Our findings highlight a statistically significant relation; however, the effect is small. Conclusions: Our findings suggest the need for further research on this topic; moreover, the proposed benchmarking method may be used in future work to determine OSS project success on collaboration platforms such as GitHub.