Authors
Jiaxin Zhu, Minghui Zhou, Audris Mockus
Publication date
2014/9/18
Book
Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
Pages
1-4
Description
Context
Every software development project uses folders to organize software artifacts.
Goal
We would like to understand how folders are used and what ramifications different uses may have.
Method
In this paper we study the frequency of folders used by 140k Github projects and use regression analysis to model how folder use is related to project popularity, i.e., the extent of forking.
Results
We find that the standard folders, such as document, testing, and examples, are not only among the most frequently used, but their presence in a project is associated with increased chances that a project's code will be forked (i.e., used by others) and an increased number of forks.
Conclusions
This preliminary study of folder use suggests opportunities to quantify (and improve) file organization practices based on folder use patterns of large collections of repositories.
Total citations
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