Open source-style collaborative development practices in commercial projects using GitHub

GitHub is a prime and popular example of an online collaborative development platform based on DVCS and has become the tool of choice for open source software projects that traditionally enjoy smooth collaboration, despite their scale and complexity, through transparency. In this project we set out to investigate how GitHub is used by teams building proprietary software in commercial organizations.

We conducted a study of software development teams using GitHub. We followed a mixed methods approach where we surveyed 240 GitHub users and had semi-structured interviews with 24 representatives of commercial software teams that use GitHub for their development. The findings from our study showed that commercial software teams use a workflow that incorporates pull requests to screen and review the team members’ individual contribution upon submission. Furthermore, the commercial teams structure their coordination around pull requests and carry out a large portion of their communication through lightweight mechanisms such as comments on commits and issues. We found that, despite the differences between open source and commercial software projects, there is a significant overlap in the collaborative development practices they follow when using GitHub. The use of GitHub, as an example of a transparent DVCS platform in a commercial organization, acts as a vehicle for the adoption of open-source style practices, potentially lowering the barriers of collaboration between projects and departments. Our future work will focus on investigating the concept of external contribution in commercial environments that follow open source-style practices.