ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology • Vol 32 • No 6
Automatic Core-Developer Identification on GitHub: A Validation Study
April 2023 • Thomas Böck, Nils Alznauer, Mitchell Joblin, Sven Apel
Many open-source software projects are self-organized and do not maintain official lists with information on developer roles. So, knowing which developers take core and maintainer roles is, despite being relevant, often tacit knowledge. We propose a method to automatically identify core developers based on role permissions of privileged events triggered in GitHub issues and pull requests. In an empirical study on 25/GitHub projects, (1) we validate the set of automatically identified core developers with a sample …