Network Structure of Social Coding in GitHub

• Published in: 2013 17th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering pp. 323 - 326
• Main Authors: Thung, F., Bissyande, T. F., Lo, D., Lingxiao Jiang
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-03-2013
• Subjects: Collaboration; developer-developer network; Encoding; Facebook; GitHub; Measurement; project-project network; Social coding; Software; Web pages
• ISBN: 1467358339; 9781467358330
• ISSN: 1534-5351; 2640-7574
• DOI: 10.1109/CSMR.2013.41

Social coding enables a different experience of software development as the activities and interests of one developer are easily advertised 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 sub network 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.