Investigating Cross-Repository Socially Connected Teams on GitHub

Abstract

Teamwork is very important to software development. There are many studies focusing on different aspects of teamwork in open source software projects, but neglecting the fact that most teams of open source projects are temporary and dependent on the context of one specific project. Whether the collaboration of such teams can extend to different projects is highly doubted. In contrast, we are interested in long-lasting socially connected teams, whose members have steady social connections and have collaborated with each other on multiple projects. Therefore, we mine Cross-Repository Socially Connected (CRSC) teams on GitHub, the largest open-source project hosting platform. Community detection methods are used to mine CRSC teams from the developer network and more than 20,000 CRSC teams are discovered on GitHub. The productivity of such teams and how the hosting repository may influence them are studied. Their preferences for repositories are investigated. Moreover, we study the structures of these teams using complex network analysis methods. Our results indicate that CRSC teams are stable, highly productive and mature. Therefore, open-source project owners and recruiters can pay more attention to such teams.