Adding sparkle to social coding: an empirical study of repository badges in the npm ecosystem

kaestner@cs.cmu.edu (A. Trockman)
Fri, 17 Jan 2020 15:18:48 -0500

Asher Trockman. Adding sparkle to social coding: an empirical study of repository badges in the npm ecosystem. In Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE-SRC), pages 524--526, New York, NY: ACM Press, 2017. ICSE Student research competition, first place.

Contemporary software development is characterized by increased reuse and speed. Open source software forges such as GitHub host millions of repositories of libraries and tools, which developers reuse liberally, creating complex and often fragile networks of interdependencies. Hence, developers must make more decisions at a higher speed, finding which libraries to depend on and which projects to contribute to. This decision making process is supported by the transparency provided by social coding platforms like GitHub, where user profile pages display information on a one's contributions, and repository pages provide information on a project's social standing (e.g., through stars and watchers).