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Title: What the fork: a study of inefficient and efficient forking practices in social coding
Forking and pull requests have been widely used in open-source communities as a uniform development and contribution mechanism, giving developers the flexibility to modify their own fork without affecting others before attempting to contribute back. However, not all projects use forks efficiently; many experience lost and duplicate contributions and fragmented communities. In this paper, we explore how open-source projects on GitHub differ with regard to forking inefficiencies. First, we observed that different communities experience these inefficiencies to widely different degrees and interviewed practitioners to understand why. Then, using multiple regression modeling, we analyzed which context factors correlate with fewer inefficiencies.We found that better modularity and centralized management are associated with more contributions and a higher fraction of accepted pull requests, suggesting specific best practices that project maintainers can adopt to reduce forking-related inefficiencies in their communities.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1813598
PAR ID:
10109926
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
Page Range / eLocation ID:
350 to 361
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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