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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 such
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.
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