GitHub and Stack Overflow: Analyzing Developer Interests Across Multiple Social Collaborative Platforms

TL;DR

This study analyzes how software developers' interests overlap across GitHub and Stack Overflow, revealing significant commonalities and patterns of shared interests among co-participants in both platforms.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive analysis of cross-platform developer interests and their correlation with collaborative activities on GitHub and Stack Overflow.

Findings

39% of developer activities involve shared interests across platforms

Developers co-participating in the same repositories and questions share more interests

Interest overlap is higher among developers engaging in collaborative activities

Abstract

Increasingly, software developers are using a wide array of social collaborative platforms for software development and learning. In this work, we examined the similarities in developer's interests within and across GitHub and Stack Overflow. Our study finds that developers share common interests in GitHub and Stack Overflow, on average, 39% of the GitHub repositories and Stack Overflow questions that a developer had participated fall in the common interests. Also, developers do share similar interests with other developers who co-participated activities in the two platforms. In particular, developers who co-commit and co-pull-request same GitHub repositories and co-answer same Stack Overflow questions, share more common interests compare to other developers who co-participate in other platform activities.