What’s in a GitHub Star? Understanding Repository Starring Practices in a Social Coding Platform

•Developers star repositories mainly to show appreciation or to bookmark projects•3 out of 4 developers check the stars metric before using or contributing to projects•But developers also evaluate other factors, such as code quality and documentation•Fast growth in the number of stars is often a res...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of systems and software Vol. 146; pp. 112 - 129
Main Authors: Borges, Hudson, Tulio Valente, Marco
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier Inc 01.12.2018
Subjects:
GitHub stars
Social coding
Software popularity
Social coding
GitHub stars
Software popularity
ISSN:0164-1212, 1873-1228
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:•Developers star repositories mainly to show appreciation or to bookmark projects•3 out of 4 developers check the stars metric before using or contributing to projects•But developers also evaluate other factors, such as code quality and documentation•Fast growth in the number of stars is often a result of promotion in social sites•When ranking projects, we should check whether stars are result of active promotion Besides a git-based version control system, GitHub integrates several social coding features. Particularly, GitHub users can star a repository, presumably to manifest interest or satisfaction with an open source project. However, the real and practical meaning of starring a project was never the subject of an in-depth and well-founded empirical investigation. Therefore, we provide in this paper a throughout study on the meaning, characteristics, and dynamic growth of GitHub stars. First, by surveying 791 developers, we report that three out of four developers consider the number of stars before using or contributing to a GitHub project. Then, we report a quantitative analysis on the characteristics of the top-5,000 most starred GitHub repositories. We propose four patterns to describe stars growth, which are derived after clustering the time series representing the number of stars of the studied repositories; we also reveal the perception of 115 developers about these growth patterns. To conclude, we provide a list of recommendations to open source project managers (e.g., on the importance of social media promotion) and to GitHub users and Software Engineering researchers (e.g., on the risks faced when selecting projects by GitHub stars).
ISSN:0164-1212
1873-1228
DOI:10.1016/j.jss.2018.09.016