A mixed-methods analysis of micro-collaborative coding practices in OpenStack
Technical collaboration between multiple contributors is a natural phenomenon in distributed open source software development projects. Macro-collaboration, where each code commit is attributed to a single collaborator, has been extensively studied in the research literature. This is much less the case for so-called micro-collaboration practices, in which multiple authors contribute to the same commit. To support such practices, GitLab and GitHub started supporting social coding mechanisms such as the “Co-Authored-By:” trailers in commit messages, which, in turn, enable to empirically study such micro-collaboration. In order to understand the mechanisms, benefits and limitations of micro-collaboration, this article provides an exemplar case study of collaboration practices in the OpenStack ecosystem. Following a mixed-method research approach we provide qualitative evidence through a thematic and content analysis of semi-structured interviews with 16 OpenStack contributors. We contrast their perception with quantitative evidence gained by statistical analysis of the git commit histories (∼1M commits) and Gerrit code review histories (∼631K change sets and ∼2M patch sets) of 1,804 OpenStack project repositories over a 9-year period. Our findings provide novel empirical insights to practitioners to promote micro-collaborative coding practices, and to academics to conduct further research towards understanding and automating the micro-collaboration process.
Thu 18 MayDisplayed time zone: Hobart change
11:00 - 12:30 | Code reviewJournal-First Papers / SEIP - Software Engineering in Practice / Technical Track at Meeting Room 103 Chair(s): Thomas LaToza George Mason University | ||
11:00 15mTalk | Workflow analysis of data science code in public GitHub repositories Journal-First Papers Dhivyabharathi Ramasamy Department of Informatics, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, Cristina Sarasua Department of Informatics, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, Alberto Bacchelli University of Zurich, Abraham Bernstein Department of Informatics, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland | ||
11:15 15mTalk | Quality Evaluation of Modern Code Reviews Through Intelligent Biometric Program Comprehension Journal-First Papers Haytham Hijazi CISUC, DEI, University of Coimbra, João Durães CISUC, Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra, Ricardo Couceiro University of Coimbra, Raul Barbosa CISUC, DEI, University of Coimbra, João Castelhano ICNAS, University of Coimbra, Júlio Medeiros CISUC, DEI, University of Coimbra, Miguel Castelo Branco ICNAS/CIBIT, University of Coimbra, Paulo Carvalho University of Coimbra, Henrique Madeira University of Coimbra | ||
11:30 15mTalk | Code Review of Build System Specifications: Prevalence, Purposes, Patterns, and Perceptions Technical Track Mahtab Nejati University of Waterloo, Mahmoud Alfadel University of Waterloo, Shane McIntosh University of Waterloo Pre-print | ||
11:45 15mTalk | Please fix this mutant: How do developers resolve mutants surfaced during code review? SEIP - Software Engineering in Practice Goran Petrovic Google; Universität Passau, René Just University of Washington, Marko Ivanković Google; Universität Passau, Gordon Fraser University of Passau | ||
12:00 15mTalk | Using Large-scale Heterogeneous Graph Representation Learning for Code Review Recommendations at Microsoft SEIP - Software Engineering in Practice Jiyang Zhang University of Texas at Austin, Chandra Maddila Microsoft Research, Ramakrishna Bairi Microsoft Research, Christian Bird Microsoft Research, Ujjwal Raizada Microsoft Research, Apoorva Agrawal Microsoft Research, Yamini Jhawar Microsoft Research, Kim Herzig Microsoft, Arie van Deursen Delft University of Technology Pre-print Media Attached | ||
12:15 7mTalk | A mixed-methods analysis of micro-collaborative coding practices in OpenStack Journal-First Papers Armstrong Foundjem Queen's University, Eleni Constantinou University of Cyprus, Tom Mens University of Mons, Bram Adams Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario | ||