2020/02/28 by Pamela Bilo Thomas, Thomas, Pamela Bilo, Rachel Krohn +3
Computer Science · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Mobile Crowdsensing and Crowdsourcing #Open Source Software Innovations #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI) #Software Engineering Research
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2003.00045
openalex publication_date 2020/02/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
When a group of people strives to understand new information, struggle ensues as various ideas compete for attention. Steep learning curves are surmounted as teams learn together. To understand how these team dynamics play out in software development, we explore Git logs, which provide a complete change history of software repositories. In these repositories, we observe code additions, which represent successfully implemented ideas, and code deletions, which represent ideas that have failed or been superseded. By examining the patterns between these commit types, we can begin to understand how teams adopt new information. We specifically study what happens after a software library is adopted by a project, i.e. when a library is used for the first time in the project. We find that a variety of factors, including team size, library popularity, and prevalence on Stack Overflow are associated with how quickly teams learn and successfully adopt new software libraries.