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1. One-off events? An empirical study of hackathon code creation and reuse

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-022-10201-x  

   Mahmoud, Ahmed Samir Imam ; Dey, Tapajit ; Nolte, Alexander ; Mockus, Audris ; Herbsleb, James D. ( September 2022 , Empirical Software Engineering)

   Hackathons have become popular events for teams to collaborate on projects and develop software prototypes. Most existing research focuses on activities during an event with limited attention to the evolution of the hackathon code.

   We aim to understand the evolution of code used in and created during hackathon events, with a particular focus on the code blobs, specifically, how frequently hackathon teams reuse pre-existing code, how much new code they develop, if that code gets reused afterwards, and what factors affect reuse.

   We collected information about 22,183 hackathon projects from Devpost and obtained related code blobs, authors, project characteristics, original author, code creation time, language, and size information from World of Code. We tracked the reuse of code blobs by identifying all commits containing blobs created during hackathons and identifying all projects that contain those commits. We also conducted a series of surveys in order to gain a deeper understanding of hackathon code evolution that we sent out to hackathon participants whose code was reused, whose code was not reused, and developers who reused some hackathon code.

   9.14% of the code blobs in hackathon repositories and 8% of the lines of code (LOC) are created during hackathons and aroundmore »a third of the hackathon code gets reused in other projects by both blob count and LOC. The number of associated technologies and the number of participants in hackathons increase reuse probability.

   The results of our study demonstrates hackathons are not always “one-off” events as the common knowledge dictates and it can serve as a starting point for further studies in this area.

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2. The Secret Life of Hackathon Code Where does it come from and where does it go?

   https://doi.org/10.1109/MSR52588.2021.00020  

   Imam, Ahmed ; Dey, Tapajit ; Nolte, Alexander ; Mockus, Audris ; Herbsleb, James D. ( May 2021 , Mining Software Repositories)

   Background: Hackathons have become popular events for teams to collaborate on projects and develop software prototypes. Most existing research focuses on activities during an event with limited attention to the evolution of the code brought to or created during a hackathon. Aim: We aim to understand the evolution of hackathon-related code, specifically, how much hackathon teams rely on pre-existing code or how much new code they develop during a hackathon. Moreover, we aim to understand if and where that code gets reused, and what factors affect reuse. Method: We collected information about 22,183 hackathon projects from DEVPOST– a hackathon database – and obtained related code (blobs), authors, and project characteristics from the WORLD OF CODE. We investigated if code blobs in hackathon projects were created before, during, or after an event by identifying the original blob creation date and author, and also checked if the original author was a hackathon project member. We tracked code reuse by first identifying all commits containing blobs created during an event before determining all projects that contain those commits. Result: While only approximately 9.14% of the code blobs are created during hackathons, this amount is still significant considering time and member constraints of suchmore »events. Approximately a third of these code blobs get reused in other projects. The number of associated technologies and the number of participants in a project increase reuse probability. Conclusion: Our study demonstrates to what extent pre-existing code is used and new code is created during a hackathon and how much of it is reused elsewhere afterwards. Our findings help to better understand code reuse as a phenomenon and the role of hackathons in this context and can serve as a starting point for further studies in this area.« less
3. How to Hackathon: Socio-technical Tradeoffs in Brief, Intensive Collocation

   https://doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2819946  

   Trainer, Erik H. ; Kalyanasundaram, Arun ; Chaihirunkarn, Chalalai ; Herbsleb, James D. ( January 2016 , Computer Supported Cooperative Work)

   Hackathons are events where people who are not normally collocated converge for a few days to write code together. Hackathons, it seems, are everywhere. We know that long- term collocation helps advance technical work and facilitate enduring interpersonal relationships, but can similar benefits come from brief, hackathon-style collocation? How do participants spend their time preparing, working face-to- face, and following through these brief encounters? Do the activities participants select suggest a tradeoff between the social and technical benefits of collocation? We present results from a multiple-case study that suggest the way that hackathon-style collocation advances technical work varies across technical domain, community structure, and expertise of participants. Building social ties, in contrast, seems relatively constant across hackathons. Results from different hackathon team formation strategies suggest a tradeoff between advancing technical work and building social ties. Our findings have implications for technology support that needs to be in place for hackathons and for understanding the role of brief interludes of collocation in loosely-coupled, geographically distributed work.
4. How to Support Newcomers in Scientific Hackathons - An Action Research Study on Expert Mentoring

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3392830  

   Nolte, Alexander ; Hayden, Linda Bailey ; Herbsleb, James D. ( May 2020 , Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   Time-bounded events such as hackathons have become a global phenomenon. Scientific communities in particular show growing interest in organizing them to attract newcomers and develop technical artifacts to expand their code base. Current hackathon approaches presume that participants have sufficient expertise to work on projects on their own. They only provide occasional support by domain experts serving as mentors which might not be sufficient for newcomers. Drawing from work on workplace and educational mentoring, we developed and evaluated an approach where each hackathon team is supported by a community member who serves in a mentor role that goes beyond providing occasional support. Evaluating this approach, we found that teams who took ownership of their projects, set achievable goals early while building social ties with their mentor and receiving learning-oriented support reported positive perceptions related to their project and an increased interest in the scientific community that organized the hackathon. Our work thus contributes to our understanding of mentoring in hackathons, an area which has not been extensively studied. It also proposes a feasible approach for scientific communities to attract and integrate newcomers which is crucial for their long-term survival.
5. E-Mentoring for Software Engineering: A Socio-Technical Perspective

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE-SEET.2017.19  

   Trainer, Erik H. ; Kalyanasundaram, Arun ; Herbsleb, James D. ( May 2017 , International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering and Education Track)

   Mentoring is one of the most effective pedagogical tools, holding great promise for software engineering education. When done badly, however, it can lead to dysfunctional inter-personal relationships and may turn off mentees from careers in software engineering. In this qualitative interview-based study we examine how socio-technical dimensions of software impact the formation of social ties important for satisfying two goals of mentorship, building technical skill and interpersonal development. We find that mentees working on user facing, interdependent software form a balance of ties that facilitate both goals, while mentees working on non-user facing software mostly form ties important for building technical skill. Work practices that create opportunities for unstructured contact between mentees and community members, such as code review in a mentee cohort, can help to overcome this imbalance. Our findings have important implications for task definition in software engineering e-mentoring program schemes.