SHF: SMALL: Streamlining Fork-Based Software Development

SHF：小型：简化基于分叉的软件开发

• 批准号: 1813598
• 负责人: Christian Kastner
• 金额: $ 49万
• 依托单位: Carnegie-Mellon University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2018-10-01 至 2021-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1813598&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SHF; SMALL; Streamlining; Fork; Based

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.

无论是在工业项目还是开源项目中，协作对于大规模的软件开发都是必不可少的。不适当的协作模式可能会扼杀创新，并严重损害开源的可持续性。这项研究调查了开发人员如何在分布式环境中使用forks进行协作。Fork是存储库(源代码、书籍、音乐作品、讲座等)的公共副本，开发人员可以在其中进行更改，包括扩展和错误修复。开发人员可以(但不一定)将这些更改贡献回原始项目。具体地说，该项目涉及开发人员活动中的低效问题，例如丢失贡献、重复开发和分散的社区。这种低效不仅浪费了有限的开发人员时间，而且往往也会打击新开发人员的积极性。这项研究将确定哪些实践在哪些环境中是有效的，并将为开发人员和团队领导提供指导。通过这种方式，这项研究将支持软件项目的可持续性，使他们能够利用更多的贡献，并激励更多的开发人员做出贡献。结合理论构建、经验数据驱动的研究和工具构建，研究将发现和评估现有的干预措施，并开发新的干预措施，通过分叉引导协作开发走向更好的实践，例如在其他独立的开发人员之间进行更好的协调。使用经验混合方法研究，从建立假设的探索性研究到对大规模开发活动日志的统计评估，研究将确定和验证开发人员在实践中用于改进协作开发的低效和干预措施，确定在哪些背景下什么是有效的。此外，这项研究将在促进协作和整合并减少冗余的轻型透明度和意识机制方面设计、开发、评估和部署新的干预措施，从而减少分叉项目中的低效率。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

项目成果

How Do Code Changes Evolve in Different Platforms? A Mining-Based Investigation

• DOI: 10.1109/icsme.2019.00033
• 发表时间: 2019-09
• 期刊: 2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)
• 作者: Markos Viggiato;Johnatan Oliveira;Eduardo Figueiredo;Pooyan Jamshidi;Christian Kästner

Exploring Differences and Commonalities between Feature Flags and Configuration Options

• DOI: 10.1145/3377813.3381366
• 发表时间: 2020-06
• 期刊: 2020 IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice (ICSE-SEIP)
• 作者: Jens Meinicke;Chu-Pan Wong;Bogdan Vasilescu;Christian Kästner

What the fork: a study of inefficient and efficient forking practices in social coding

• DOI: 10.1145/3338906.3338918
• 发表时间: 2019-08
• 期刊: Proceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
• 作者: Shurui Zhou;Bogdan Vasilescu;Christian Kästner

Understanding collaborative software development: an interview study

了解协作软件开发：访谈研究

• DOI: 10.1145/3372787.3390442
• 发表时间: 2020
• 期刊: ICGSE '20: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Global Software Engineering
• 作者: Constantino, Kattiana;Zhou, Shurui;Souza, Mauricio;Figueiredo, Eduardo;Kästner, Christian
• 通讯作者: Kästner, Christian

How Has Forking Changed in the Last 20 Years? A Study of Hard Forks on GitHub

• DOI: 10.1145/3377811.3380412
• 发表时间: 2020-06
• 期刊: 2020 IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)
• 作者: Shurui Zhou;Bogdan Vasilescu;Christian Kästner