Yue Yu
ABSTRACT
Social coding paradigm is reshaping the distributed software development with a surprising speed in recent years. Github, a remarkable social coding community, attracts a huge number of developers in a short time. Various kinds of social networks are formed based on social activities among developers. Why this new paradigm can achieve such a great success in attracting external developers, and how they are connected in such a massive community, are interesting questions for revealing power of social coding paradigm. In this paper, we firstly compare the growth curves of project and user in GitHub with three traditional open source software communities to explore differences of their growth modes. We find an explosive growth of the users in GitHub and introduce the Diffusion of Innovation theory to illustrate intrinsic sociological basis of this phenomenon. Secondly, we construct follow-networks according to the follow behaviors among developers in GitHub. Finally, we present four typical social behavior patterns by mining follow-networks containing independence-pattern, group-pattern, star-pattern and hub-pattern. This study can provide several instructions of crowd collaboration to newcomers. According to the typical behavior patterns, the community manager could design corresponding assistive tools for developers.
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Index Terms
- Exploring the patterns of social behavior in GitHub
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