Saturday, October 4, 2014

Involvement, Contribution and Influence in Github and Stack Overflow

[Download Pdf]

Type: Publication

Venue: Conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative Research (CASCON) 2014, November 3-5, Markham, ON, Canada

Authors: Ali Sajedi Badashian, Afsaneh Esteki, Ameneh Gholipour, Abram Hindle, Eleni Stroulia
Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, Canada

Abstract
Software developers are increasingly adopting social-media platforms to contribute to software development, learn and develop a reputation for themselves. GitHub supports version-controlled code sharing and social-networking functionalities and Stack Overflow is a social forum for question answering on programming topics. Motivated by the features’ overlap of the two networks, we set out to mine and analyze and correlate the members’ core contributions, editorial activities and influence in the two networks. We aim to better understand the similarities and differences of the members’ contributions in the two platforms and their evolution over time. In this context, while studying the activities of different user groups, we conducted a three-step investigation of GitHub activity, Stack Overflow activity and inter-network activity over a five-year period. We report our findings on interesting membership and activity patterns within each platform and some relations between the two.

Keywords:
Mining software repositories, Crossnetwork analysis, time series analysis, GitHub,
StackOverflow


Tuesday, July 1, 2014