Analyzing the Productivity of GitHub Teams based on Formation Phase Activity

TL;DR

This study investigates how early activity patterns in GitHub teams during the first six months influence long-term productivity, identifying three distinct work styles and their impact on team effectiveness.

Contribution

It introduces a novel clustering approach to categorize team work styles based on early activity data, linking these styles to team performance.

Findings

Identified three work styles: toilers, communicators, collaborators.

Early activity patterns influence long-term team productivity.

Coordination processes established early are crucial for effective collaboration.

Abstract

Our goal is to understand the characteristics of high-performing teams on GitHub. Towards this end, we collect data from software repositories and evaluate teams by examining differences in productivity. Our study focuses on the team formation phase, the first six months after repository creation. To better understand team activity, we clustered repositories based on the proportion of their work activities and discovered three work styles in teams: toilers, communicators, and collaborators. Based on our results, we contend that early activities in software development repositories on GitHub establish coordination processes that enable effective collaborations over time.