prj_doc/2_background.tex

57 lines
2.7 KiB
TeX

\section{Related work}
\label{sec:bg}
After years of development,
GitHub has synthesized various functionalities for OSS development,
such as hosting source code, tracking issues~\cite{bissyande2013got}, and submitting pull requests~\cite{Gousios:2014}.
An increasing number of developers are collaborating on GitHub,
which leads GitHub to be the main platform for community-based collaboration.
As aforementioned,
profile documentation is crucial for OSS communities to operate and survive.
However,
according to previous research in this area~\cite{Steinmacher2016,Gousios:2016,lee2017understanding,GitHubOpenSourceSurvey2017},
one of the main challenges faced by OSS developers, especially the newcomers,
is the lack of or the low quality of such documentation.
To make it more clear about what content should be included in
community profile documentation,
researchers have conducted several content analyses.
Prana \etal~\cite{Prana2018Categorizing} manually annotated the contents of hundreds of \RDM files in GitHub,
established a scheme of meaningful categories, and explored the frequency of different catagories.
They found that
the most common categories are relating to how to use the project and what the project is about.
Additionally,
they proposed a classifier to automatically annotate the sections of \RDM files.
Vendome \etal~\cite{Vendome2017License} studied the usage and change of OSS licenses in 16,221 Java projects.
Their quantitative findings show that
the studied projects prefer to use a permissive license like Apache-2.0.
They also observed that
licenses can be quickly updated to the new version
and tend to migrate toward less restrictive ones.
Tourani \etal~\cite{Tourani2017Code} investigated the adoption of \COD files in OSS projects.
They conducted queries on both GitHub and Google and presented 11 \COD templates that were commonly used.
The content of \COD files was summarized as specifying the expectations against community participants' behavior
in order to create a friendly and inclusive community.
Elazhary \etal~\cite{elazhary2019not} studied on 72 GitHub projects using CI tools~\cite{Yu:2015b},
and examined the content of their \CON files.
They found five main themes around contribution guidelines,
including
project orientation, contribution workflow, and pull request acceptance criteria.
Also,
their examination of the actual activity trace data uncovered
contribution practices that were not introduced in the \CON files.
The above research focused on a single kind of documentation, and mainly investigated the content of documentation.
Our work can complement the current understanding of community profile documentation by providing a quantitative description of its prevalence and maintenance.