GitQ- Towards Using Badges as Visual Cues for GitHub Projects

TL;DR

GitQ is a browser plugin that automatically adds visual badges to GitHub repositories, helping developers quickly assess project information and choose suitable repositories more efficiently.

Contribution

This paper introduces GitQ, a novel browser plugin that augments GitHub repositories with informative badges, improving repository selection through visual cues.

Findings

11 out of 15 developers found GitQ useful for repository identification.

GitQ effectively displays source code and maintenance information via badges.

The tool is accessible as a browser plugin and available on GitHub.

Abstract

GitHub hosts millions of software repositories, facilitating developers to contribute to many projects in multiple ways. Most of the information about the repositories is text-based in the form of stars, forks, commits, and so on. However, developers willing to contribute to projects on GitHub often find it challenging to select appropriate projects to contribute to or reuse due to the large number of repositories present on GitHub. Further, obtaining this required information often becomes a tedious process, as one has to carefully mine information hidden inside the repository. To alleviate the effort intensive mining procedures, researchers have proposed npm-badges to outline information relating to build status of a project. However, these badges are static and limit their usage to package dependency and build details. Adding visual cues such as badges to the repositories might reduce the search space for developers. Hence, we present GitQ, to automatically augment GitHub repositories with badges representing information about source code and project maintenance. Presenting GitQ as a browser plugin to GitHub could make it easily accessible to developers using GitHub. GitQ is evaluated with 15 developers based on the UTAUT model to understand developer perception towards its usefulness. We observed that 11 out of 15 developers perceived GitQ to be useful in identifying the right set of repositories using visual cues such as generated by GitQ. The source code and tool are available for download on GitHub at https://github.com/gitq-for-github/plugin, and the demo can be found at https://youtu.be/c0yohmIat3A.