We Are Family: Analyzing Communication in GitHub Software Repositories and Their Forks

GitHub facilitates software development practices that encourage collaboration and communication. Part of GitHub's model includes forking, which enables users to make changes on a copy of the base repository. The process of forking opens avenues of communication between the users from the base repository and the users from the forked repositories. Since forking on GitHub is a common mechanism for initiating repositories, we are interested in how communication between a repository and its forks (forming a software family) relates to stars. In this paper, we study communications within 385 software families comprised of 13,431 software repositories. We find that the fork depth, the number of users who have contributed to multiple repositories in the same family, the number of followers from outside the family, familial pull requests, and reported issues share a statistically significant relationship with repository stars. Due to the importance of issues and pull requests, we identify and compare common topics in issues and pull requests from inside the repository (via branching) and within the family (via forking). Our results offer insights into the importance of communication within a software family, and how this leads to higher individual repository star counts.