Analyzing the Impact of COVID-19 on GitHub Event Trends

Abstract

Economic development, as one of the three pillars of sustainability, can be enhanced by utilizing open-source software. The impact of the pandemic on software development and whether or not it managed to sustain the velocity and volume it previously had has already piqued the interest of the research community. From measuring the activity of developers to conducting surveys on the perceived productivity, the research was mostly focused on 2020. This paper focuses on how the pandemic impacted public development on GitHub by analyzing the changes in trends during the 2020–2022 period (COVID-19 period) compared with 2017–2019 (pre-COVID-19 period). While the majority of events have continued with relatively the same trend, having minor increases or decreases, there have been a few that stood out. Several events related to the community activity on GitHub experienced decreases in their trends (ForkEvent’s trend decreased 0.09×, IssuesEvent 0.01×, etc.), while events related to discussions have experienced a positive trend (mainly CommitCommentEvent, with a trend increase of 34×, but also IssueCommentEvent, which remained stable despite the 0.01× decrease of IssuesEvent), but only CommitCommentEvent and PushEvent (which experienced a 2.52× increase in its trend) exhibited non-stationary behavior in the ADF test. In general, events related to individual development have sustained or increased their trends, while events related to community activity (i.e., forking) or contributions to documentation have somewhat decreased. We believe this shows that although there have been minor reductions in the casual and community contributions on GitHub, the majority of events continued with the same trend or even with some increases, which shows that GitHub developers persevered in the face of the pandemic.