Dynamics of Team Library Adoptions: An Exploration of GitHub Commit Logs

TL;DR

This paper analyzes GitHub commit logs to understand team dynamics during software library adoption, revealing how factors like team size and library popularity influence learning and adoption speed.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of commit patterns to study team learning processes during library adoption in software projects.

Findings

Larger teams tend to adopt libraries more quickly.

Popular libraries are adopted faster by teams.

Prevalence on Stack Overflow correlates with quicker adoption.

Abstract

When a group of people strives to understand new information, struggle ensues as various ideas compete for attention. Steep learning curves are surmounted as teams learn together. To understand how these team dynamics play out in software development, we explore Git logs, which provide a complete change history of software repositories. In these repositories, we observe code additions, which represent successfully implemented ideas, and code deletions, which represent ideas that have failed or been superseded. By examining the patterns between these commit types, we can begin to understand how teams adopt new information. We specifically study what happens after a software library is adopted by a project, i.e., when a library is used for the first time in the project. We find that a variety of factors, including team size, library popularity, and prevalence on Stack Overflow are associated with how quickly teams learn and successfully adopt new software libraries.