Browsing by Author "Demeyer, Serge"

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    An Empirical Investigation of Forks as Variants in the npm Package Distribution
    (BENEVOL, 2020) Businge, John; Decan, Alexandre; Zerouali, Ahmed; Mens, Tom; Demeyer, Serge
    Software developers often need to create variants to accommodate different customer segments. These variants have a common code base but also comprise variant-specific code. A common strategy to create a variant is to clone&own (or fork) an existing repository and then adapt it to the new requirements. This form of reuse has been enhanced with the advent of socialcoding platforms such as GitHub, and package distribution platforms like npm. GitHub offers facilities for forking, pull requests, and cross-project traceability. npm offers facilities for managing package release dependencies and dependents on the distribution platform. Little is known about the maintenance practices of the variants. We therefore performed an exploratory investigation on the evolution of variants, focusing on their technical aspects. We collected variants from the JavaScript ecosystem, whose sources are hosted on GitHub, and whose packages are released on npm. We have identified a total 12,813 variant forks from the JavaScript ecosystem. In general, we observed that mainlines have more number of package releases, package dependencies, dependent packages and dependent projects compared to their variant counterparts. However, it is still interesting that some variants have quite a considerable number of package releases and dependent packages/projects; in a some cases even more than their mainline counterparts.
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    An Empirical Study of Technical Debt Management as a Motivation for Forking
    (In BENEVOL, 2020) Njima, Mercy; Businge, John; Demeyer, Serge
    Forking is an often used idiom in software ecosystems that allows for the immediate reuse of existing software packages. Further, research shows that forking negatively impacts software quality since it distributes the maintenance effort across several repositories. However, there is a lack of sufficient knowledge exploring the validity and applicability of forking as an approach to solve software quality issues. In this position paper we present a plan to investigate the effectiveness of forking in managing technical debt.
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    Variant Forks - Motivations and Impediments
    (IEEE, 2022) Businge, John; Zerouali, Ahmed; Decan, Alexandre; Mens, Tom; Demeyer, Serge; De Roover, Coen
    Social coding platforms centred around git provide explicit facilities to share code between projects: forks, pull requests, cherry-picking to name but a few. Variant forks are an interesting phenomenon in that respect, as they permit for different projects to peacefully co-exist, yet explicitly acknowledge the common ancestry. Several researchers analysed forking practices on open source platforms and observed that variant forks get created frequently. However, little is known on the motivations for launching such a variant fork. Is it mainly technical (e.g., diverging features), governance (e.g., diverging interests), legal (e.g., diverging licences), or do other factors come into play? We report the results of an exploratory qualitative analysis on the motivations behind creating and maintaining variant forks. We surveyed 105 maintainers of different active open source variant projects hosted on GitHub. Our study extends previous findings, identifying a number of fine-grained common motivations for launching a variant fork and listing concrete impediments for maintaining the co-existing projects.