Open Source Software Development Challenges: A Systematic Literature Review on GitHub

Abstract

GitHub is the most common code hosting and repository service for open-source software (OSS) projects. Thanks to the great variety of features, researchers benefit from GitHub to solve a wide range of OSS development challenges. In this context, the authors thought that was important to conduct a literature review on studies that used GitHub data. To reach these studies, they conducted this literature review based on a GitHub dataset source study instead of a keyword-based search in digital libraries. Since GHTorrent is the most widely known GitHub dataset according to the literature, they considered the studies that cite this dataset for the systematic literature review. In this study, they reviewed the selected 172 studies according to some criteria that used the dataset as a data source. They classified them within the scope of OSS development challenges thanks to the information they extract from the metadata of studies. They put forward some issues about the dataset and they offered the focused and attention-grabbing fields and open challenges that we encourage the researchers to study on them.