Understanding the Working Habits of GH-SO Users on GitHub Commit Activity and Stack Overflow Post Activity

Abstract

GitHub and Stack Overflow are often used together for software development. GH-SO users, who use both GitHub and Stack Overflow, contribute to the development of various software projects in GitHub and share their knowledge and experience on software development in Stack Overflow. To widely understand the interests and working habits of GH-SO users on software development, it is important to investigate how GH-SO users utilize GitHub and Stack Overflow. In this paper, we present an exploratory study on GitHub commit and Stack Overflow post activities of GH-SO users. Specifically, we investigate the working habits of GH-SO users on GitHub commit and Stack Overflow post activities. We randomly selected 19,756 of GH-SO users as our target sample and collected 2,819,483 and 2,147,317 of commit activity data and post activity data of the GH-SO users. We then categorized the collected commit and post activity datasets into specific categories on programming languages and statistically analyzed the categorized commit and post activity datasets. As the results of our analysis, we found the following: (1) The overall commit and post activities of the GH-SO users share some similarity. (2) The commit activities gradually change while the post activities drastically change over time. (3) The commit activities of the GH-SO users are broadly distributed while the post activities are narrowly distributed and the commit activity can be better predictor for post activity. (4) The commit activity of the GH-SO users tends to be performed prior post activity. We believe that our findings can contribute to finding the ways to better support commit and post activities of GitHub and Stack Overflow users.