SHF: SMALL: Streamlining Fork-Based Software Development

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Collaboration is essential for software development at scale, in both industrial and open-source projects. Inadequate models of collaboration can stifle innovation and severely hurt open-source sustainability. This research investigates how developers collaborate in distributed settings with forks. Forks are public copies of repositories (source code, books, musical composition, lectures, and so forth) in which developers can make changes, including extensions and bug fixes. Developers may, but do not have to, contribute these changes back to the original project. Specifically, this project is concerned with inefficiencies in developer activities, such as lost contributions, redundant development, and fragmented communities. Such inefficiencies are not only wasteful with regard to the scarce developer time, but also often demotivating for new developers. This research will identify which practices are efficient in which contexts and will provide guidance for developers and team leads. This way, this research will support sustainability of software projects, allowing them to draw on more contributions and motivating more developers to contribute.Combining theory building, empirical data-driven research, and tool building, the research will discover and evaluate existing interventions and develop new ones that steer collaborative development with forks toward better practices, such as better coordination among otherwise independent developers. Using empirical mixed-methods research, from exploratory studies building hypotheses to statistical evaluations on logs of development activities at scale, the research will identify and validate measures of inefficiencies and interventions developers use in practice to improve collaborative development, identifying what is effective in which contexts. In addition, this research will design, develop, evaluate, and deploy new interventions in terms of light-weight transparency and awareness mechanisms that foster collaboration and integration and reduce redundancies, thus reducing inefficiencies within forked projects.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.