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Article
Network structure of social coding in GitHub
CSMR 2013: Proceedings of the 2013 17th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering: 5-8 March 2013, Genova, Italy
  • Ferdian THUNG, Singapore Management University
  • Tegawende F. BISSYANDE
  • David LO, Singapore Management University
  • Lingxiao JIANG, Singapore Management University
Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
3-2013
Abstract

Social coding enables a different experience of software development as the activities and interests of one developer are easily advertized to other developers. Developers can thus track the activities relevant to various projects in one umbrella site. Such a major change in collaborative software development makes an investigation of networkings on social coding sites valuable. Furthermore, project hosting platforms promoting this development paradigm have been thriving, among which GitHub has arguably gained the most momentum. In this paper, we contribute to the body of knowledge on social coding by investigating the network structure of social coding in GitHub. We collect 100,000 projects and 30,000 developers from GitHub, construct developer-developer and project-project relationship graphs, and compute various characteristics of the graphs. We then identify influential developers and projects on this subnetwork of GitHub by using PageRank. Understanding how developers and projects are actually related to each other on a social coding site is the first step towards building tool supports to aid social programmers in performing their tasks more efficiently.

ISBN
9781467358330
Identifier
10.1109/CSMR.2013.41
Publisher
IEEE
City or Country
Piscataway, NJ
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International
Additional URL
http://doi.org/10.1109/CSMR.2013.41
Citation Information
Ferdian THUNG, Tegawende F. BISSYANDE, David LO and Lingxiao JIANG. "Network structure of social coding in GitHub" CSMR 2013: Proceedings of the 2013 17th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering: 5-8 March 2013, Genova, Italy (2013) p. 323 - 326
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/david_lo/102/