Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

5-2021

Abstract

Online collaboration platforms such as GitHub have provided software developers with the ability to easily reuse and share code between repositories. With clone-and-own and forking becoming prevalent, maintaining these shared files is important, especially for keeping the most up-to-date version of reused code. Different to related work, we propose the concept of meta-maintenance-i.e., tracking how the same files evolve in different repositories with the aim to provide useful maintenance opportunities to those files. We conduct an exploratory study by analyzing repositories from seven different programming languages to explore the potential of meta-maintenance. Our results indicate that a majority of active repositories on GitHub contains at least one file which is also present in another repository, and that a significant minority of these files are maintained differently in the different repositories which contain them. We manually analyzed a representative sample of shared files and their variants to understand which changes might be useful for meta-maintenance. Our findings support the potential of meta-maintenance and open up avenues for future work to capitalize on this potential.

Keywords

Computer languages, Statistical analysis, Tools, Maintenance engineering, Software, Software development management, Software engineering

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Madrid, Spain, May 22-30

First Page

773

Last Page

784

ISBN

9780738113197

Identifier

10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00076

Publisher

IEEE Computer Society

City or Country

Los Alamitos, CA

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00076

Download

Share

COinS