Code forking and software development project sustainability: Evidence from GitHub

Bogdan Negoita, Gregory Vial, Maha Shaikh, Aurélie Labbe

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference paperpeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Increasing numbers of software projects-proprietary and open source-are developed and maintained by heterogeneous communities of developers. As a result, the sustainability of software projects has become an important issue for members of those communities and their user bases. Building on the idea of forking as “an individual developer's behavior of copying an existing project's code base” and its signaling of active community involvement and participation, we ask the question: How does forking impact the sustainability of software development projects? Through the curation of digital trace data gathered from 749 software projects hosted on GitHub, we develop a longitudinal model to explain the contributions of various types of forking on software development project sustainability. Our findings contribute to research by moving beyond the conceptualization of forking as a monolithic concept and shows the benefits of certain types of forking for software projects' sustainability.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication40th International Conference on Information Systems, ICIS 2019
PublisherAssociation for Information Systems
ISBN (Electronic)9780996683197
Publication statusPublished - 2020
Event40th International Conference on Information Systems, ICIS 2019 - Munich, Germany
Duration: 15 Dec 201918 Dec 2019

Publication series

Name40th International Conference on Information Systems, ICIS 2019

Conference

Conference40th International Conference on Information Systems, ICIS 2019
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityMunich
Period15/12/201918/12/2019

Keywords

  • Digital trace data
  • Forking
  • GitHub
  • Linear mixed model
  • Python
  • Software development
  • Software development project sustainability

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