一句话：通过大规模混合方法研究揭示 npm 仓库徽章作为质量信号的有效性与局限。
在快速、重复用且分布式的软件开发中，GitHub 等社交编程平台提供的透明度对决策至关重要，开发者依赖个人资料和仓库页面上的可见信号推断项目质量。本文聚焦 npm 包中新兴的仓库徽章现象，研究维护者意图传递哪些质量属性，以及徽章与这些属性的相关性。作者通过开发者调查、挖掘 294,941 个仓库，并进行统计建模与时间序列分析，发现显示构建状态、测试覆盖率和依赖更新程度等非平凡徽章大多是可靠信号，与更多测试、更好的 pull request 和更新鲜的依赖相关；展示这些徽章与最佳实践相关，但效果并不总是持续。
In fast-paced, reuse-heavy, and distributed software development, the transparency provided by social coding platforms like GitHub is essential to decision making. Developers infer the quality of projects using visible cues, known as signals, collected from personal profile and repository pages. We report on a large-scale, mixed-methods empirical study of npm packages that explores the emerging phenomenon of repository badges, with which maintainers signal underlying qualities about their projects to contributors and users. We investigate which qualities maintainers intend to signal and how well badges correlate with those qualities. After surveying developers, mining 294,941 repositories, and applying statistical modeling and time-series analyses, we find that non-trivial badges, which display the build status, test coverage, and up-to-dateness of dependencies, are mostly reliable signals, correlating with more tests, better pull requests, and fresher dependencies. Displaying such badges correlates with best practices, but the effects do not always persist.
DOI 原文 ·
@inproceedings{paperbot4530,
title = {Adding sparkle to social coding},
author = {Asher Trockman and Shurui Zhou and Christian Kästner and Bogdan Vasilescu},
booktitle = {ICSE},
year = {2018},
doi = {10.1145/3180155.3180209}
}