Improving Collaboration Efficiency in Fork-Based Development

Abstract

Fork-based development is a lightweight mechanism that allows developers to collaborate with or without explicit coordination. Although it is easy to use and popular, when developers each create their own fork and develop independently, their contributions are usually not easily visible to others. When the number of forks grows, it becomes very difficult to maintain an overview of what happens in individual forks, which would lead to additional problems and inefficient practices: lost contributions, redundant development, fragmented communities, and so on. Facing the problems mentioned above, we developed two complementary strategies: (1) Identifying existing best practices and suggesting evidence-based interventions for projects that are inefficient; (2) designing new interventions that could improve the awareness of a community using fork-based development, and help developers to detect redundant development to reduce unnecessary effort.