The promises and perils of mining git

By Christian Bird, Peter C. Rigby, Earl T. Barr, David J. Hamilton, Daniel M. Germán, Premkumar T. Devanbu. IEEE International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, 2009

336 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We are now witnessing the rapid growth of decentralized source code management (DSCM) systems, in which every developer has her own repository. DSCMs facilitate a style of collaboration in which work output can flow sideways (and privately) between collaborators, rather than always up and down (and publicly) via a central repository. Decentralization comes with both the promise of new data and the peril of its misinterpretation. We focus on git, a very popular DSCM used in high-profile projects. Decentralization, and other features of git, such as automatically recorded contributor attribution, lead to richer content histories, giving rise to new questions such as “How do contributions flow between developers to the official project repository?” However, there are pitfalls. Commits may be reordered, deleted, or edited as they move between repositories. The semantics of terms common to SCMs and DSCMs sometimes differ markedly, potentially creating confusion. For example, a commit is immediately visible to all developers in centralized SCMs, but not in DSCMs. Our goal is to help researchers interested in DSCMs avoid these and other perils when mining and analyzing git data.

Subfields: Computer Science Applications, Information Systems, Information Systems and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3d7f482edc1844d85319b26ee5a2df8aac20ce89

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Citations in the corpus

The promises and perils of mining GitHub (2009, background): “[6] described the promises associated with exploiting the information stored in a decen-”
An exploratory study of the pull-based software development model (2014, methodology): “The development models afforded by DVCSs are a superset of those in centralized version control environments [31, 6].”
Gender and Tenure Diversity in GitHub Teams (2015, methodology): “Validity of extraction of information from G IT H UB can be threatened in a way similar to digital trace data [32] or put in a “peril” by concerns related to mining Git repositories in general [9], or speciﬁcally G IT H UB data [34].”