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Last updated on Thursday, November 16, 2023
@incollection{Businge2023Ecosystems,
author = {John Businge and Mehrdad Abdi and Serge Demeyer},
booktitle = {Software Ecosystems: Tooling and Analytics},
editor = {Tom Mens and Coen De Roover and Anthony Cleve},
pages = {131 -- 152},
publisher = {Springer International Publishing},
title = {Analyzing Variant Forks of Software Repositories from
Social Coding Platforms},
year = {2023},
abstract = {With the rise of social coding platforms that rely on
distributed version control systems, software reuse
is also on the rise. Through the provision of
explicit facilities to share code like pull requests,
cherry-picking, and traceability links, social coding
platforms have popularised forking (also referred to
as ``clone-and-own''). Two types of forks exist: (i)
social forks that are created for isolated
development to fix a bug, feature, refactoring, and
then merged back into the original project; and (ii)
variant forks that are created by splitting off a new
development branch to steer development into a new
direction while leveraging the code of the mainline
project. The literature has extensively investigated
social forks on social coding platforms, but there
are limited studies on variant forks. However, a few
studies have revealed that variant forking is quite
prevalent on social coding platforms. Furthermore,
the studies have revealed that with an increasing
number of variants of the original project,
development becomes redundant, and maintenance
efforts rapidly grow. For example, if a bug is
discovered and fixed in one variant, it is often
unclear which other variants in the same family are
affected by the same bug and how they should be fixed
in these variants. In this chapter, our focus is on
variant forks in the social coding era. First, we
discuss studies that have investigated variant forks
both before and after the emergence of social coding
platforms. Next, we identify challenges with the
parallel maintenance of variant forks and research
directions that can possibly provide support.},
annote = {bookchapter},
doi = {10.1007/978-3-031-36060-2_6},
}