Computer Science

Computer Science ›› 2023, Vol. 50 ›› Issue (6A): 220600221-8.doi: 10.11896/jsjkx.220600221

• Software & Interdiscipline • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Empirical Study on Application and Maintenance of OSS Community Profile Documentation

ZHANG Yu1, WANG Zhe2, LI Zhixing1, YU Yue1, WANG Tao1, CAI Mengluan1   

  1. 1 College of Computer Science and Technology,National University of Defense Technology,Changsha 410000,China;
    2 School of Public Policy and Management,Tsinghua University,Beijing 100084,China
  • Online:2023-06-10 Published:2023-06-12
  • About author:ZHANG Yu,born in 1995,postgra-duate.Her main research interests include software engineering,data mining,and knowledge graph in open source communities. LI Zhixing ,born in 1992,assistant professor.His main research interests include software engineering,data mi-ning,and knowledge discovering in open source communities.
  • Supported by:
    Research on Open Source Ecosystem Construction,Governance and Security Assessment of Ubiquitous Operating System based on Crowd Intelligence Paradigm(62141209).

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Abstract: Community profile documentation is crucial for the establishment and management of open source software(OSS) communities.Although prior research has conducted content analysis of community profile documentation,little is known about how common it is in practice and how it is maintained by OSS practitioners.We aim at complementing the current understanding of community profile documentation by providing a quantitative description of its prevalence and maintenance.We randomly collect 2000 OSS projects from GitHub,based on which we study the documentation popularity by programming language,repository owner type,repository age,and community size,respectively.We also investigate the maintenance practice of community profile documentation in terms of location,creation latency,maintainers,update frequency and change-triggering events,respectively.The README and LICENSE documentation is far more popular and created earlier than the CONTRIBUTING,CONDUCT and TEMPLATE documentation in GitHub OSS projects.Community profile documentation is more likely to be found in repositories of TypeScript,repositories of larger community size,and repositories owned by organizations.Community profile documentation is mainly placed in the root directory and changed by a small group of developers with a low frequency of update,which is mostly driven by perfective and adaptive requirements.

Key words: Open source software, Community profile documentation, Documentation prevalence, Documentation maintenance, GitHub

CLC Number: 

  • TP311
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