Identifying features in forks

• Published in: 2018 IEEE/ACM 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) pp. 105 - 116
• Main Authors: Zhou, Shurui, Stănciulescu, Ştefan, Leßenich, Olaf, Xiong, Yingfei, Wąsowski, Andrzej, Kästner, Christian
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 27.05.2018
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Community detection; Computer bugs; Feature extraction; Fork-based development; Github; Google; History; Information retrieval; Navigation; overview of forks; transparency; Visualization

Fork-based development has been widely used both in open source communities and in industry, because it gives developers flexibility to modify their own fork without affecting others. Unfortunately, this mechanism has downsides: When the number of forks becomes large, it is difficult for developers...