On the need of integrating social media channels and open source software repositories

Abstract

The growing interest in the usage of social media channels have attracted the open source software community to adopt an identity in order to disseminate project-related information to a wider audience. We foresee the need to integrate social media channels and open source software repositories in order to get an integrated view on the software project not only from the software development perspective but also from social perspective. Therefore, in this paper we study the usage of Twitter by software developers through harvesting their project-related activities on Twitter. In particular, we present the most commonly used hashtags by software developers and further investigate if project-related hashtags are the most frequent and commonly used hashtags by software developers. Based on our findings, we argue that relevant information from social media channels should be integrated with the open source software repositories in order to provide a homogeneous view on a software project.