A User Evaluation of a Collaborator Recommender based on Co-Changed Files

Abstract

Active collaboration is essential for the success of software projects across the development life-cycle. Unfortunately, in social coding platforms, such as GitHub, it is still challenging for developers to identify potential collaborators with whom they could engage to create new/stronger ties and enhance the quality of contributions. To this end, we implemented developer recommendation strategies and prototype tool to help project contributors improve their collaborations. Thus, in this work, we described a controlled experimental study concerned usability and user satisfaction to investigate the developers’ perceptions of using CoopFinder, a prototype tool to support two strategies for recommending collaborations. These developer recommendation strategies aim to connect developers of a specific project based on their similar interests. The study involved 35 participants, 18 of which were GitHub users, and 17 were non–GitHub users. We asked participants to perform the experiment tasks to find collaborators with similar interests using a prototype recommendation tool and GitHub. We reported a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of strategies and tool using the state of the practice as a baseline. As a result, we observed that recommender based on co–changed files can provide suitable collaborator recommendations to developers of a specific project. About 66% of the participants confirmed they would use or recommend this tool.