A Study of the Characteristics of Developers´ Activities in GitHub

What types of developers do active software projects have? This paper presents a study of the characteristics of developers´ activities in open source software development. GitHub, a widely-used hosting service for software development projects, provides APIs for collecting various kinds of GitHub data. To clarify the characteristics of developers´ activities, we used these APIs to investigate GitHub events generated by each developer. Using this information, we categorized developers based on measures such as whether they prefer communication by coding or comments, or whether they are specialists or generalists. Our study indicates that active software projects have various kinds of developers characterized by different types of development activities.