Developer Identity Linkage and Behavior Mining Across GitHub and StackOverflow

Nowadays, software developers are increasingly involved in GitHub and StackOverflow, creating a lot of valuable data in the two communities. Researchers mine the information in these software communities to understand developer behaviors, while previous works mainly focus on mining data within a single community. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to developer identity linkage and behavior mining across GitHub and StackOverflow. This approach links the accounts from two communities using a CART decision tree, leveraging the features from usernames, user behaviors and writing styles. Then, it explores cross-site developer behaviors through T-graph analysis, LDA-based topics clustering and cross-site tagging. We conducted several experiments to evaluate this approach. The results show that the precision and F-score of our identity linkage method are higher than previous methods in software communities. Especially, we discovered that (1) active issue committers are also active question askers; (2) fo...

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