An Empirical Study of Activity, Popularity, Size, Testing, and Stability in Continuous Integration

Published in The Mining Software Repositories (MSR) Conference, 2017

Recommended citation: Gautam, A., Vishwasrao, S., & Servant, F. (2017). An Empirical Study of Activity, Popularity, Size, Testing, and Stability in Continuous Integration. In 2017 IEEE/ACM 14th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR). http://aakash.xyz/files/msr2017.pdf

A good understanding of the practices followed by software development projects can positively impact their success - particularly for attracting talent and on-boarding new members. In this paper, we perform a cluster analysis to classify software projects that follow continuous integration in terms of their activity, popularity, size, testing, and stability. Based on this analysis, we identify and discuss four different groups of repositories that have distinct characteristics that separates them from the other groups. With this new understanding, we encourage open source projects to acknowledge and advertise their preferences according to these defining characteristics, so that they can recruit developers who share similar values.

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