Mining Fork-Including Software Development Traces.

Open-source software development is a common practice that encourages collaborative development and reuse across projects. Forking is a way to make a copy of an existing project and explore it for different purposes. Two types of forks are commonly mentioned in the literature: contributing forks which continue the development lines of the forked projects and aim at merging the contribution back to the forked projects; and independently developed forks which open new lines of development deviating from the forked projects. In this study, we aim to explore characteristics of fork-involving traces for better understanding collaboration and reuse considerations in software development. Analyzing 880 Java projects and their related action and observation events, with process mining and statistical techniques, we found that the occurrence of certain event types may predict the fork type, while the creation of certain fork types increase the involvement of users in the forked projects.