What the fork: a study of inefficient and efficient forking practices in social coding
What the fork: a study of inefficient and efficient forking practices in social coding
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DOI：
10.1145/3338906.3338918
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发表时间：
2019-08
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Shurui Zhou;Bogdan Vasilescu;Christian Kästner
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文献类型：
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作者：
Shurui Zhou;Bogdan Vasilescu;Christian Kästner
Forking和Pull requests作为一种统一的开发和贡献机制在开源社区中得到了广泛的应用，使开发人员能够灵活地修改自己的fork，而不会影响其他人。然而，并不是所有的项目都有效地使用fork;许多项目都经历了丢失和重复的贡献以及分散的社区。在本文中，我们将探讨GitHub上的开源项目在分叉效率方面的差异。首先，我们观察到不同的社区在很大程度上经历了这些低效率，并采访了从业者以了解原因。然后，我们使用多元回归模型分析了哪些上下文因素与更少的低效率相关，我们发现更好的模块化和集中管理与更多的贡献和更高比例的接受拉取请求相关，建议项目维护者可以采用特定的最佳实践来减少社区中与分叉相关的低效率。
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.