An Empirical Study to Investigate Collaboration Among Developers in Open Source Software (OSS)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The value of teamwork is being recognized by project owners, resulting in an increased acknowledgement of collaboration among developers in software engineering. A good understanding of how developers work together could positively impact software development practices. In this paper, we investigate the collaboration habits of developers in project files by leveraging the World of Code (WoC) dataset and GitHub API. We first identify the collaboration level of developers within the project files, such as the source, test, documentation, and build files, using the Author Cross Entropy (ACE). From the results we find out that test files report the highest degree of collaboration among the developers, perhaps because collaboration is critical to ensure convergence of functionality tests. Furthermore, the source code files show the least degree of collaboration, perhaps because of code ownership and the complexity and difficulty in code modification. Secondly, given the widespread usage of the Python programming language, we investigate the Python code tokens that are more prone to change and collaboration. Our findings offer insights into the specific project files and Python code tokens that developers typically collaborate on in the open-source community. This information can be used by researchers and developers to enhance existing collaboration platforms and tools.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.064 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".