Background: Hackathons have become popular events for teams to work on projects and develop software prototypes. Most existing research focuses on the event itself and on the collaboration of the team that attempts a project while there is limited insight into the evolution of the code that is used and created during a hackathon. Aim: We aim to understand the evolution of the code that is used and created by a team during a hackathon. Specifically, we aim to study to what extent hackathon teams utilize existing code, develop new code during a hackathon, and whether and where the code developed by the team gets reused in other OSS projects. Moreover, we aim to identify aspects that can affect code reuse. Method: We collected information about 22,183 hackathon projects from Devpost – a hackathon database – and obtained further information about the code (blobs), the authors, and the project characteristics using World of Code – a dataset of open source projects. We identified the original authors of the code blobs in the hackathon projects and investigated if these were created before, during, or after the hackathon event. We tracked code reuse by identifying all commits containing the same code blobs which were created by one of the hackathon project members during the event in that project, and all projects which contained those commits. Result: We found that, by volume, most of the code in the hackathon projects is created before the event and by someone other than the hackathon project members, most of which is JavaScript code. Overall, around 28.8% of hackathon code blobs get reused in other projects, with 57.73% of the reused code being used in small projects, 32.85% in medium projects, and 9.42% in large projects. Project characteristics related to how prolific it is and how familiar other developers are with the project increase the code reuse probability, while the composition of a repository in terms what are the different types of files it contains has a more complex interaction with the code reuse probability. Conclusion: Our study sheds light on the extent pre-existing code is used or new code is created during a hackathon and reused afterwards. Our findings can help to better understand code reuse as a phenomenon and the role of hackathons in this context. Moreover, they can serve as a starting point for further studies in this area.
Tue 18 MayDisplayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change
17:00 - 17:50 | HackathonTechnical Papers / Hackathon at MSR Room 1 Chair(s): Jim Herbsleb Carnegie Mellon University, Audris Mockus The University of Tennessee, Alexander Nolte University of Tartu | ||
17:01 2m | Welcome by the MSR Hackathon Co-Chairs Hackathon Jim Herbsleb Carnegie Mellon University, Audris Mockus The University of Tennessee, Alexander Nolte University of Tartu | ||
17:03 3mTalk | An Exploratory Study of Project Activity Changepoints in Open Source Software Evolution Hackathon | ||
17:06 3mPaper | The Diversity-Innovation Paradox in Open-Source Software Hackathon Mengchen Sam Yong Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, Lavinia Francesca Paganini Federal University of Pernambuco, Huilian Sophie Qiu Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, José Bayoán Santiago Calderón University of Virginia, USA DOI Pre-print | ||
17:09 4mTalk | The Secret Life of Hackathon Code Technical Papers Ahmed Samir Imam Mahmoud University of Tartu, Tapajit Dey Lero - The Irish Software Research Centre and University of Limerick, Alexander Nolte University of Tartu, Audris Mockus The University of Tennessee, Jim Herbsleb Carnegie Mellon University Pre-print | ||
17:13 3mTalk | Tracing Vulnerable Code Lineage Hackathon David Reid University of Tennessee, Kalvin Eng University of Alberta, Chris Bogart Carnegie Mellon University, Adam Tutko University of Tennessee - Knoxville Pre-print | ||
17:16 3mTalk | Building the Collaboration Graph of Open-Source Software Ecosystem Hackathon Pre-print | ||
17:19 1mTalk | The Secret Life of Hackathon Code Hackathon Ahmed Samir Imam Mahmoud University of Tartu, Tapajit Dey Lero - The Irish Software Research Centre and University of Limerick Pre-print | ||
17:20 30mLive Q&A | Discussions and Q&A Technical Papers |
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