RepoLike: amulti-feature-based personalized recommendation approach for open-source repositories

Abstract

With the deep integration of software collaborative development and social networking, social coding represents a new style of software production and creation paradigm. Because of their good flexibility and openness, a large number of external contributors have been attracted to the open-source communities. They are playing a significant role in open-source development. However, the open-source development online is a globalized and distributed cooperative work. If left unsupervised, the contribution process may result in inefficiency. It takes contributors a lot of time to find suitable projects or tasks from thousands of open-source projects in the communities to work on. In this paper, we propose a new approach called “RepoLike,” to recommend repositories for developers based on linear combination and learning to rank. It uses the project popularity, technical dependencies among projects, and social connections among developers to measure the correlations between a developer and the given projects. Experimental results show that our approach can achieve over 25% of hit ratio when recommending 20 candidates, meaning that it can recommend closely correlated repositories to social developers.

Keywords

Social coding / Open-source software / Personal recommendation / GitHub

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

Zhejiang University and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature