ForkXplorer: an approach of fork summary generation

Abstract

Pull-based development has become an important paradigm for distributed software development. In this model, each developer independently works on a copied repository (i.e., a fork) from the central repository. It is essential for developers to maintain awareness of the state of other forks to improve collaboration efficiency. In this paper, we propose a method to automatically generate a summary of a fork. We first use the random forest method to generate the label of a fork, i.e., feature implementation or a bug fix. Based on the information of the fork-related commits, we then use the TextRank algorithm to generate detailed activity information of the fork. Finally, we apply a set of rules to integrate all related information to construct a complete fork summary. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we conduct 30 groups of manual experiment and 77 groups of case studies on Github. We propose Fe{a}_{avg} to evaluate the performance of the generated fork summary, considering the content accuracy, content integrity, sentence fluency, and label extraction accuracy. The results show that the average of Fe{a}_{avg} of the fork summary generated by this method is 0.672. More than 63% of project maintainers and the contributors believe that the fork summary can improve development efficiency.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

open source software / pull-based development / fork summary / distributed cooperative development

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