Developing Theory and Methods to Understand and Improve Collaboration in Open Source Software Development on GitHub

Abstract

As a result of fundamental changes in organizational needs and practices, social coding, a facet of modern collaboration, has become a prevalent phenomenon in software development. While the adoption of social media platforms for social coding, like GitHub, has enabled distributed, asynchronous collaboration among software developers, the structure of such platforms introduces a novel set of socio-technical challenges that cognitive engineering is uniquely qualified to address. Towards this end, we examine GitHub’s social and technical features as a means for both improving and hindering coordination and problem solving in software development. Through an integration of existing theories from the organizational sciences with recent research in social coding, we offer a set of preliminary research questions aimed at improving understanding of open source software development.