MSR 2020
Mon 29 - Tue 30 June 2020
co-located with ICSE 2020

The fork-based development mechanism provides the flexibility and the unified processes for software teams to collaborate easily in a distributed setting without too much coordination overhead. Currently, multiple social coding platforms support fork-based de- velopment, such as GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket. Although these different platforms virtually share the same features, they have different emphasis. As GitHub is the most popular platform and the corresponding data is publicly available, most of the current stud- ies are focusing on GitHub hosted projects. However, we observed anecdote evidences that people are confused about choosing among these platforms, and some projects are migrating from one platform to another, and the reasons behind these activities remain unknown. With the advances of Software Heritage Graph Dataset (SWHGD), we have the opportunity to investigate the forking activities across platforms. In this paper, we conduct an exploratory study on 10 popular open-source projects to identify cross-platform forks and investigate the motivation behind. Preliminary result shows that cross-platform forks do exist. For the 10 subject systems in this study, we found 81,357 forks in total among which 179 forks are on GitLab. Based on our qualitative analysis, we found that most of the cross-platform forks that we identified are mirrors of the repos- itories on another platform, but we still find cases that were created due to preference of using certain functionalities (e.g. Continuous Integration (CI)) supported by different platforms. This study lays the foundation of future research directions, such as understanding the differences between platforms and supporting cross-platform collaboration.

Mon 29 Jun

Displayed time zone: (UTC) Coordinated Universal Time change

12:00 - 13:00
MSR Mining ChallengeMining Challenge / Technical Papers at MSR:Zoom2
Chair(s): Antoine Pietri Inria, Diomidis Spinellis Athens University of Economics and Business, Stefano Zacchiroli Université de Paris and Inria

Q/A & Discussion of Session Papers over Zoom (Joining info available on Slack)

12:00
20m
Live Q&A
Cheating Death: A Statistical Survival Analysis of Publicly Available Python ProjectsMSR - Mining Challenge
Mining Challenge
A: Ali Rao Hamza , A: Chelsea Parlett-Pelleriti , A: Erik Linstead Chapman University
Pre-print Media Attached
12:20
20m
Live Q&A
An investigation to find motives behind cross-platform forks from Software Heritage datasetMSR - Mining Challenge
Mining Challenge
A: Avijit Bhattacharjee University of Saskatchewan, Canada, A: Sristy Sumana Nath Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan, A: Shurui Zhou Carnegie Mellon University, USA / University of Toronto, CA, A: Debasish Chakroborti , A: Banani Roy University of Saskatchewan, A: Chanchal K. Roy University of Saskatchewan, A: Kevin Schneider University of Saskatchewan
DOI Pre-print Media Attached
12:40
20m
Live Q&A
Exploring the Security Awareness of the Python and JavaScript Open Source CommunitiesMSR - Mining Challenge
Mining Challenge
Gabor Antal , Márton Keleti , A: Peter Hegedus University of Szeged
Pre-print Media Attached