Capturing Spotaneous Software Evolution in a Social Coding Platform With Project-as-a-City Concept

Social coding platforms (SCPs) have realized spontaneous software evolution, where new source code and ideas are spontaneously proposed by altruistic developers. Although there are many projects operated by active communities performing spontaneous evolution, it is yet unclear that how such successful projects and communities have been formed and governed. This article proposes a method that can investigate the history of every project in the SCP. Introducing the concept of project as a city, the authors consider every project in the SCP as a city, where a government and citizens develop a city through collaborative activities. This research then identifies essential attributes that characterize a state of a city. For each attribute, the authors develop metrics that quantify the state S(p; t) of a project p at time t. An experimental evaluation investigating GitHub projects of famous code editors shows that the proposed metrics well visualize the history of the projects from essential perspectives of a city.