arrow
Return

Automatic Core-Developer Identification on GitHub: A Validation Study

delete2023-09-30
delete3
delete
OA
AI
T
Thomas Böck *
N
Nils Alznauer
M
Mitchell Joblin
S
Sven Apel
DOI:10.1145/3593803delete
deleteOriginal
deleteShare
deleteSave
Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Many open-source software projects are self-organized and do not maintain official lists with information on developer roles. So, knowing which developers take core and maintainer roles is, despite being relevant, often tacit knowledge. We propose a method to automatically identify core developers based on role permissions of privileged events triggered in GitHub issues and pull requests. In an empirical study on 25 GitHub projects, (1) we validate the set of automatically identified core developers with a sample of project-reported developer lists, and (2) we use our set of identified core developers to assess the accuracy of state-of-the-art unsupervised developer classification methods. Our results indicate that the set of core developers, which we extracted from privileged issue events, is sound and the accuracy of state-of-the-art unsupervised classificationmethods depends mainly on the data source (commit data versus issue data) rather than the network-construction method (directed versus undirected, etc.). In perspective, our results shall guide research and practice to choose appropriate unsupervised classificationmethods, and ourmethod can help create reliable ground-truth data for training supervised classification methods.
Keywords:
Open-source software projects
developer classification
developer networks

Journal

A
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
IF:
6.2
Papers:
1.3K
Citations:
3.8K

Organization

S
Siemens AG
Scholars:
26
Papers: 16
Citations: 0
S
Saarland University
Scholars:
247
Papers: 116
Citations: 3
Cited Papers

Cited Papers

Let Me In: Guidelines for the Successful Onboarding of Newcomers to Open Source Projects
err2019-07-01
err65
errOAAI
errSteinmacher, Igor; Treude, Christoph; Gerosa, Marco Aurelio
errShare
errSave
Sciatic Palsy in Premature Infants
errJAMA
IF0
err1960-11-19
err0
PREAI
errPaul H. Curtiss
errShare
errSave
Mining the Technical Roles of GitHub Users
err2021-03-01
err17
PREAI
errMontandon, Joao Eduardo; Valente, Marco Tulio; Silva, Luciana L.
errShare
errSave
How Peripheral Developers Contribute to Open-Source Software Development
err2012-03-01
err89
PREAI
errSetia, Pankaj; Rajagopalan, Balaji; Sambamurthy, Vallabh; Calantone, Roger
errShare
errSave
Evolutionary trends of developer coordination: a network approach
err2016-11-29
err31
PREAI
errJoblin, Mitchell; Apel, Sven; Mauerer, Wolfgang
errShare
errSave
An empirical study of integration activities in distributions of open source software
err2015-03-31
err21
PREAI
errAdams, Bram; Kavanagh, Ryan; Hassan, Ahmed E.; German, Daniel M.
errShare
errSave
researcher View more