Popular Projects Research Articles

The Power of Bots

Leveraging the pull request model of social coding platforms, Open Source Software (OSS) integrators review developers' contributions, checking aspects like license, code quality, and testability. Some projects use bots to automate predefined, sometimes repetitive tasks, thereby assisting integrators' and contributors' work. Our research investigates the usage and impact of such bots. We sampled 351 popular projects from GitHub and found that 93 (26%) use bots. We classified the bots, collected metrics from before and after bot adoption, and surveyed 228 developers and integrators. Our results indicate that bots perform numerous tasks. Although integrators reported that bots are useful for maintenance tasks, we did not find a consistent, statistically significant difference between before and after bot adoption across the analyzed projects in terms of number of comments, commits, changed files, and time to close pull requests. Our survey respondents deem the current bots as not smart enough and provided insights into the bots' relevance for specific tasks, challenges, and potential new features. We discuss some of the raised suggestions and challenges in light of the literature in order to help GitHub bot designers reuse and test ideas and technologies already investigated in other contexts.

Visualizing Certainty: What the Cultural History of the Gantt Chart Teaches Technical and Professional Communicators about Management

ABSTRACTUsing a cultural-historical genre analysis of the Gantt chart, the author describes how, when a project’s progress and scope are being considered, this popular project management visualization evokes managerial values of certainty and simplicity. These values, instantiated in early 20th-century scientific management philosophy, are made visually manifest in Henry L. Gantt’s popular chart. These charts require technical and professional communicators to gauge the rhetorical implications of using them when providing their expertise in communicating project management.

Chemistry in Pictures

ShanghaiTech University is hosting an exhibition of photography in partnership with C&EN. The images in the exhibit are part of our Chemistry in Pictures series, a wildly popular project that we started in 2014. Today the series includes hundreds of chemistry-related photographs. In case you are not aware, Chemistry in Pictures is a collection of images that showcases the beauty of chemistry, chemical engineering, and related sciences. Many of the images are contributed by scientists around the world. They are accompanied by a brief description of the image and how it came to be. You can see all the photos in C&EN’s Chemistry in Pictures at cenm.ag/chemistryinpictures. We regularly select the most visually appealing to include in C&EN’s print magazine. To encourage scientists to contribute to Chemistry in Pictures, we run competitions in which monthly winners receive a $50 cash prize. An annual grand-prize winner gets the winning photograph featured

RevRec: A two-layer reviewer recommendation algorithm in pull-based development model

Code review is an important process to reduce code defects and improve software quality. In social coding communities like GitHub, as everyone can submit Pull-Requests, code review plays a more important role than ever before, and the process is quite time-consuming. Therefore, finding and recommending proper reviewers for the emerging Pull-Requests becomes a vital task. However, most of the current studies mainly focus on recommending reviewers by checking whether they will participate or not without differentiating the participation types. In this paper, we develop a two-layer reviewer recommendation model to recommend reviewers for Pull-Requests (PRs) in GitHub projects from the technical and managerial perspectives. For the first layer, we recommend suitable developers to review the target PRs based on a hybrid recommendation method. For the second layer, after getting the recommendation results from the first layer, we specify whether the target developer will technically or managerially participate in the reviewing process. We conducted experiments on two popular projects in GitHub, and tested the approach using PRs created between February 2016 and February 2017. The results show that the first layer of our recommendation model performs better than the previous work, and the second layer can effectively differentiate the types of participation.

An Analysis of x86-64 Inline Assembly in C Programs

C codebases frequently embed nonportable and unstandardized elements such as inline assembly code. Such elements are not well understood, which poses a problem to tool developers who aspire to support C code. This paper investigates the use of x86-64 inline assembly in 1264 C projects from GitHub and combines qualitative and quantitative analyses to answer questions that tool authors may have. We found that 28.1% of the most popular projects contain inline assembly code, although the majority contain only a few fragments with just one or two instructions. The most popular instructions constitute a small subset concerned largely with multicore semantics, performance optimization, and hardware control. Our findings are intended to help developers of C-focused tools, those testing compilers, and language designers seeking to reduce the reliance on inline assembly. They may also aid the design of tools focused on inline assembly itself.

Exploring the Characteristics of Issue-Related Behaviors in GitHub Using Visualization Techniques

Feedback from software users, such as bug reports, is vital in the management of software projects. In GitHub, the feedback is typically expressed as new issues. Through filing issue reports, users may help identify and fix bugs, document software code, and enhance software quality via feature requests. In this paper, we aim at investigating some characteristics of issues to facilitate issue management and software management. We investigate the important degrees of behaviors that are related to issues in popular projects to assess the importance of issues in GitHub and analyze the effectiveness of issue labeling for issue handling. Then, we explore the patterns of issue commits over time in popular projects based on visual analysis and obtain the following results: we find that the behaviors that are related to issues play important roles in the GitHub. We also find that the time distribution of issue commits follows a three-period development model, which approximately corresponds to the project life cycle. These results may provide a new knowledge about issues that can help managers manage and allocate project resources more effectively and even reduce software failures.

АНАЛИЗ ИНФОРМАЦИОННО-АНАЛИТИЧЕСКОГО ОБЕСПЕЧЕНИЯ ПРОЕКТНОЙ ДЕЯТЕЛЬНОСТИ ПОДДЕРЖКИ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОГО УПРАВЛЕНИЯ

The project management software in public administration has been analyzed. The basic principles and criteria for evaluating project management software have been systematized. The software evaluation rules have been derived. The list of used state information systems to support project activities in the constituent entities of the Russian Federation is highlighted Conclusions have been drawn based on a comparison of dedicated systems and the most popular project management products. Based on the formulated rules, a comparison was made of the most popular project management products, as well as some of the selected information systems, and conclusions were drawn from the comparison results.

Challenges of Applying Agile Principles and Values to IT Project Management

The theoretical part of this paper focuses on a macro-analysis of the Agile system philosophy, one of the most popular project management frameworks from the software industry. The second part of the paper consists of a case study analyzing the practices of the Agile framework within a corporation at the level of software production. As far as methodology is concerned, the qualitative research was conducted through a case study of a team in a distributed context (“cross-team”). Participant observation was used as a tool for collecting the data about the individuals and the processes within the teams. The purpose of the research was to analyze the current state of implementation, the benefits and challenges of using the Agile project management framework and also the needs of software development teams within a multinational company. At the same time, the paper analyzes the redefinition of roles by applying the Agile project management framework within the distributed teamwork organization. The research aims to identify the underlying reasons for the choice of the Agile type of management instead of Lean management within the software development industry, focusing on the level of implementation of the Agile/Scrum methodology and principles in distributed teams.

From Bandung (1955) to 2015: Old and New Challenges for the States, The Nations and The Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America

The first wave of the revival of the states and nations of Asia and Africa which shaped major changes in history organized itself in the Bandung spirit. The framework was that of countries non-aligned to neo-colonialism, the pattern of globalization at that time. Now, the same nations, as well as those of Latin America, are challenged by neoliberal globalization, which is no less imbalanced by nature. Therefore, they must unite to face the challenge successfully as they did in the past. They will, in that perspective, feed a new wave of revival and progress of the three continents. To that effect they need to take forward the construction of alternative sovereign, popular and democratic projects in the three continents. This essay examines some major dimensions of that challenge.

Understanding inactive yet available assignees in GitHub

ContextIn GitHub, an issue or a pull request can be assigned to a specific assignee who is responsible for working on this issue or pull request. Due to the principle of voluntary participation, available assignees may remain inactive in projects. If assignees ever participate in projects, they are active assignees; otherwise, they are inactive yet available assignees (inactive assignees for short). ObjectiveOur objective in this paper is to provide a comprehensive analysis of inactive yet available assignees in GitHub. MethodWe collect 2,374,474 records of activities in 37 popular projects, and 797,756 records of activities in 687 projects belonging to 8 organizations. We compute the percentage of inactive assignees in projects, and compare projects with and without inactive assignees. Then we analyze datasets to explore why some assignees are inactive. Finally, we send questionnaires to understand impacts of inactive assignees. ResultsWe find that some projects have high percentage of inactive yet available assignees. For example, 66.35% of assignees never participate in the project paperclip. The project paperclip belongs to the organization thoughtbot. In the organization thoughtbot, 84.4% of projects have more than 80% of inactive assignees. We further observe that the main reason for developers being inactive assignees is that developers work for organizations and automatically become available assignees of some projects in the organizations. However, these developers do not work on projects. 37.25% of developers that we have surveyed agree that inactive assignees affect open source software development (i.e., causing unresolved issues or pull requests, and delaying software development). ConclusionSome organizations should improve team management, and carefully select developers to become assignees in projects. Future studies about assignees should be careful to perform data cleaning, since some available assignees are added by virtue of their employment and do not really work on projects.

Among Races, Nations, and Diasporas: Genealogies of “La bamba” in Mexico and the United States

This article examines how “La bamba” entered into the cultural politics of Mexican nationalism, the African diaspora, and Chicano nationalism. As one of Mexico’s most popular songs, “La bamba” provides a window into the multiple historically contingent ways in which scholars and cultural producers assign racial and geographic roots to music. Between 1930 and 1987, Mexican and US intellectuals and performers characterized it as indigenous, European, mestizo, black, African-descended, and Afro-Caribbean in their ethnographic accounts, musical compositions and performances, films, and dance. This article rethinks scholarly conceptions of Mexican identity that define the nation in relation to its indigenous and Spanish roots and that imply, if not declare, that blackness has disappeared from national culture. It contends that there was no coherent state-sponsored or popular project to construct, let alone erase, blackness from local, regional, and national cultures after the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The song’s African-descended melodies, harmonies, and rhythms were sometimes emphasized and other times ignored while intellectuals and performers struggled to classify culturally mixed music. These ambiguities allowed “La bamba” to move seamlessly from Mexican nationalism to the cultural initiatives of the African diaspora and the Chicano Movement.

The LloydRelaxer: An Approach to Minimize Scaling Effects for Multivariate Projections.

Star Coordinates are a popular projection technique in order to analyze and to disclose characteristic patterns of multidimensional data. Unfortunately, the shape, appearance, and distribution of such patterns are strongly affected by the given scaling of the data and can mislead the projection-based data analysis. In an extreme case, patterns might be more related to the choice of scaling than to the data themselves. Thus, we present the LloydRelaxer : a tool to minimize scaling-based effects in Star Coordinates. Our algorithm enforces a scaling configuration for which the data explains the observed patterns better than any scaling of them could do. It does so by an iterative minimizing and optimization process based on Voronoi diagrams and on the Lloyd relaxation within the projection space. We evaluate and test our approach by real benchmark multidimensional data of the UCI data repository.

A Lagrangian Simulation of the Floating-Arm Trebuchet

SummaryThe floating-arm trebuchet, a modern variation of a medieval weapon, is a popular project for physics and engineering instructors.We develop and analyze a model of this device as an introduction to constrained Lagrangian dynamics.

Risk Management of Process Moving from Traditional to Agile Software Development

Agile programming is the popular software project development method in this era. Many company moving from Traditional software development to agile software development. They move to agile to reduce delivery time, user gap and improve quality. When use traditional method, we usually find big gap when we deliver to user. The solution of this problem is agile method. In Agile, we frequently come to users to tell them what we have done to their requirements. So the gap is not too big and we can solve it fast. But moving to agile software development is not easy. There are some risks when we move to new method. The data for this study were drawn from PT. XYZ. This company trying to move from traditional method into agile method. This company wants to move of the development method in all business units. The notion of this paper is to propose the risk management when company moving their method from Traditional into Agile software development based on study PT XYZ.

Identifying evolution patterns: a metrics‐based approach for external library reuse

SummarySoftware development highly depends on using functionality of external libraries and frameworks because of the inherent benefits of software reuse. As projects evolve over time, it is a common and beneficial task to upgrade the external libraries to their latest versions because bugs are solved or new functionality is implemented. Nonetheless, external libraries evolve as well and undergo architectural and structural changes and therefore, impact the projects that use them in the case of library upgrades. In this paper, we propose a metrics‐based approach in order to identify evolution patterns of candidate reuse libraries and ultimately, assist in selecting new libraries for reuse or upgrading existing libraries. We propose a metrics suite that measures structural and behavioral attributes of software systems' evolution that affect their possible reuse by other projects. The proposed metrics measure the overall stability of software systems in terms of their structural consistency and resilience to introducing new bugs, maintainers' focus on resolving the existing bugs and their focus on preserving the system's structural complexity low. Next, we identify patterns in the metrics' behavior during projects' evolution in order to provide insight about the implications in the case of their reuse. We present our findings of a set of nine popular projects, six of which are maintained by the Apache Software Foundation, and report the results concerning the derived metrics' values and the studied library evolution patterns. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Sovereign Popular Project; The Alternative to Liberal Globalization

Global capitalism as practiced today is a complex matrix of states (sovereign nations in principle), peoples, nations (be they “homogenous” or not), and social classes formed by the capital/labor conflict inherent to the capitalist mode of production. As such, conflicts between states and class struggles are interwoven in a close relationship of interdependence. The interdependence of social struggles in various countries of the world, therefore, depends on how the various dominant blocs exploit the possibilities at their disposal in the international arena. Success here depends upon the value of their respective political and social projects. This article argues that the cooperation of independent nation states founded on the Sovereign Popular Project (embracing industrial self-sufficiency, food sovereignty, and popular democracy) is a fundamental precondition for a progressive move beyond the current international system of imperialist hegemony.

Project time–cost trade-off: a Bayesian approach to update project time and cost estimates

Uncertainties among time and cost items are important to consider because of their immense impacts on the overall performance of any project. In this paper, a project’s cost and time elements are improved by crashing and a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) model is developed to handle the uncertainties. BBN provides a framework for presenting causal relationships and enables probabilistic inference among a set of variables. The approach used in this paper can explicitly quantify the cost amount and time taken in various circumstances considering all the relevant uncertainties among the elements. The total cost and time of any project can be projected in this approach very effectively with certain probabilities. Sensitivity analysis is also performed to find the most important tasks of the project in terms of cost and time. The capabilities of the proposed approach are explained by an empirical example and the results of the proposed method are compared with those of other popular project management tools.

Who should comment on this pull request? Analyzing attributes for more accurate commenter recommendation in pull-based development

Context: The pull-based software development helps developers make contributions flexibly and efficiently. Commenters freely discuss code changes and provide suggestions. Core members make decision of pull requests. Both commenters and core members are reviewers in the evaluation of pull requests. Since some popular projects receive many pull requests, commenters may not notice new pull requests in time, and even ignore appropriate pull requests.Objective:Our objective in this paper is to analyze attributes that affect the precision and recall of commenter prediction, and choose appropriate attributes to build commenter recommendation approach.Method:We collect 19,543 pull requests, 206,664 comments and 4817 commenters from 8 popular projects in GitHub. We build approaches based on different attributes, including activeness, text similarity, file similarity and social relation. We also build composite approaches, including time-based text similarity, time-based file similarity and time-based social relation. The time-based social relation approach is the state-of-the-art approach proposed by Yu et al. Then we compare precision and recall of different approaches.Results:We find that for 8 projects, the activeness based approach achieves the top-3 precision of 0.276, 0.386, 0.389, 0.516, 0.322, 0.572, 0.428, 0.402, and achieves the top-3 recall of 0.475, 0.593, 0.613, 0.66, 0.644, 0.791, 0.714, 0.65, which outperforms approaches based on text similarity, file similarity or social relation by a substantial margin. Moreover, the activeness based approach achieves better precision and recall than composite approaches. In comparison with the state-of-the-art approach, the activeness based approach improves the top-3 precision by 178.788%, 30.41%, 25.08%, 41.76%, 49.07%, 32.71%, 25.15%, 78.67%, and improves the top-3 recall by 196.875%, 36.32%, 29.05%, 46.02%, 43.43%, 27.79%, 25.483%, 79.06% for 8 projects.Conclusion:The activeness is the most important attribute in the commenter prediction. The activeness based approach can be used to improve the commenter recommendation in code review.

Risk-communication issues in radiation safety: Mass consciousness about radiation and nuclear industry based on the results of a sociological research in St. Petersburg, the Leningrad region and the Murmansk region

The study is devoted to a mass reflection of the problems of radiation safety and the functioning of the nuclear industry in the modern Russia. The analysis of the population’s awareness, peculiarities of the perception of radiation risks and the tendencies in the formation of a public assessment of large nuclear projects have been carried out. Materials and Methods: The data were collected during mass surveys of representative samples of the population of two regions located in the Northwest of the Russian Federation: 1) St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region. (2369 respondents, November 2016) and 2) the Murmansk region. (802 respondents May 2017). The results show that radiation is perceived by society as one of the most significant threats to life and health. However, the public concern does not give rise to a mass interest in the thematic information. The real level of knowledge of the population is clearly insufficient for literate actions in an extreme situation, or for the safe behavior in the everyday life. Public opinion is formed mainly on the basis of mass media reports. At the same time, it has been established that groups of the population well informed in the radiation field are much more likely, than others, to support the nuclear industry, including the least popular projects. Conclusion: Therefore, active informing of the population on the issues of the operation of nuclear facilities, the presence of radioactive contamination sites and other sources of danger, etc. objectively contribute to the growth of the industry’s reputation. It is advisable to use social technologies to overcome the cognitive and practical passivity of the Russian citizens and to form the population’s radiation culture.

Эволюционная разработка системы визуального планирования проектов на основе объектно-ориентированного каркаса

The article describes the practical experience of developing a prospective visual planning system based on an object-oriented framework. The used framework is a system of classes and interfaces intended for software implementation of models, methods and applications of scheduling theory. Due to the availability of ready-to-use components for the solution of typical problems as well as the mechanisms for their configuration and extension, development of applications becomes a relatively simple process. The application of the framework allows to implement the necessary functional for project planning in the target system as well as to provide its subsequent evolution by generalizing the statements of the problems and expanding the arsenal of algorithms used to solve them. The described experience can be claimed when building other applications of scheduling theory. The paper discusses the general issues of organizing a software toolkit in the form of the object-oriented framework, a methodology for creation of scheduling theory applications on its basis, as well as a process of developing a target system for visual planning of projects based on the methodology and the framework. Results of computational experiments comparing the performance of the developed system with some popular project management systems are also presented in the paper. Recommendations on the development and evolution of scheduling theory applications based on the framework are summarized in conclusion.