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MSR 2021
Mon 17 - Wed 19 May 2021
co-located with ICSE 2021
Tue 18 May 2021 17:09 - 17:13 at MSR Room 1 - Hackathon Chair(s): Jim Herbsleb, Audris Mockus, Alexander Nolte

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 May

Displayed 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
3m
Talk
An Exploratory Study of Project Activity Changepoints in Open Source Software Evolution
Hackathon
James Walden Northern Kentucky University, Noah Burgin, Kuljit Kaur Chahal Kaur
17:06
3m
Paper
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
4m
Talk
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
3m
Talk
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
3m
Talk
Building the Collaboration Graph of Open-Source Software Ecosystem
Hackathon
Elena Lyulina JetBrains Research, Mahmoud Jahanshahi
Pre-print
17:19
1m
Talk
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
30m
Live Q&A
Discussions and Q&A
Technical Papers


Information for Participants
Tue 18 May 2021 17:00 - 17:50 at MSR Room 1 - Hackathon Chair(s): Jim Herbsleb, Audris Mockus, Alexander Nolte
Info for room MSR Room 1:

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