Adding Sparkle to Social Coding: An Empirical Study of Repository Badges in the npm Ecosystem

kaestner@cs.cmu.edu (A. Trockman, S. Zhou, C. Kästner, B. Vasilescu)
Wed, 28 Nov 2018 13:18:40 -0500

Asher Trockman, Shurui Zhou, Christian Kästner, and Bogdan Vasilescu. 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), pages 511--522, New York, NY: ACM Press, May 2018.

In fast-paced, reuse-heavy software development, the transparency provided by social coding platforms like GitHub is essential to decision making. Developers infer the quality of projects using visible cues, known as signals, collected from personal profile and repository pages. We report on a large-scale, mixed-methods empirical study of npm packages that explores the emerging phenomenon of repository badges, with which maintainers signal underlying qualities about the project to contributors and users. We investigate which qualities maintainers intend to signal and how well badges correlate with those qualities. After surveying developers, mining 294,941 repositories, and applying statistical modeling and time series analysis techniques, we find that non-trivial badges, which display the build status, test coverage, and up-to-dateness of dependencies, are mostly reliable signals, correlating with more tests, better pull requests, and fresher dependencies. Displaying such badges correlates with best practices, but the effects do not always persist.