Apples, Oranges & Fruits -- Understanding Similarity of Software Projects Through The Lens of Dissimilar Artifacts

TL;DR

This paper explores the novel idea that software repositories can be similar even when their artifacts differ, by analyzing various artifact types like documentation, commits, and source code.

Contribution

It demonstrates that dissimilar artifacts such as commits and documentation can reveal similarities between different software projects, challenging traditional artifact comparison methods.

Findings

Dissimilar artifacts can indicate repository similarity.

Similarities exist between dissimilar artifacts like commits and documentation.

The approach broadens understanding of software repository similarity.

Abstract

The growing availability of open source projects has facilitated developers to reuse existing software artifacts and leverage them to develop new software. However, it is hard to understand the notion of similarity as it varies from developer to developer. Some developers might search for repositories with similar source code, while some might be in search of repositories with similar requirements or issues. Existing approaches tend to find similar projects by comparing similar artifacts such as source-code to source-code, API usage to API usage, documentation to documentation, and so on. Even though there is a dissimilarity between two similar artifacts, there could be a similarity between two dissimilar artifacts. Hence, in this paper, we aim to answer the question - Can we find similarity of software repositories through dissimilar artifacts?. To this end, we conduct an experiment to find similarities between three repositories, two similar and one different project comparing similar and dissimilar artifacts (documentation, commits, and source-code). We observed similarities between dissimilar artifacts such as Commits, Source Code, and Readme Files in the context of both similar and different repositories.