Abstract
Software collaboration platforms where millions of developers from diverse locations can contribute to the common open source projects have recently become popular. On these platforms, various information is obtained from developer activities that can then be used as developer metrics to solve a variety of challenges. In this study, we proposed new developer metrics extracted from the issue, commit, and pull request activities of developers on GitHub. We created developer metrics from the individual activities and combined certain activities according to some common traits. To evaluate these metrics, we created an item-based project recommendation system. In order to validate this system, we calculated the similarity score using two methods and assessed top-n hit scores using two different approaches. The results for all scores with these methods indicated that the most successful metrics were binary_issue_related, issue_commented, binary_pr_related, and issue_opened. To verify our results, we compared our metrics with another metric generated from a very similar study and found that most of our metrics gave better scores that metric. In conclusion, the issue feature is more crucial for GitHub compared with other features. Moreover, commenting activity in projects can be equally as valuable as code contributions. The most of binary metrics that were generated, regardless of the number of activities, also showed remarkable results. In this context, we presented improvable and noteworthy developer metrics that can be used for a wide range of open-source software development challenges, such as user characterization, project recommendation, and code review assignment.
Highlights
Thanks to the increasing capabilities of open source software (OSS) development tools, the number of open-source users and projects is growing each year
We developed a project recommendation system due to evaluate these metrics using data from GitHub with the aim of making recommendations to developers based on their GitHub activities
We applied all of these metrics to the project recommendation model and evaluated the results with the top 1, 3, 5, 10, and 20 recommendations hit scores
Summary
Thanks to the increasing capabilities of open source software (OSS) development tools, the number of open-source users and projects is growing each year. GitHub, is the largest one among these platforms, that hosting more than 40 million repositories to which over 100 million developers have contributed On this platform, several features are used to manage the distributed and open-source projects of which the most widely used are issues, commits, and pull requests (PRs). Several features are used to manage the distributed and open-source projects of which the most widely used are issues, commits, and pull requests (PRs) Activities related to these features—such as opening an issue, merging a PR, or commenting on a commit—can provide information about the developers and projects. PR allows users to inform others about changes they have pushed to a branch in a repository on GitHub. PRs are a key feature when contributing code by different developers to a single project [11]. If the result of a review is positive, the PR is integrated into the master branch
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