Exploring the Relationship Between Developer Activities and Profile Images on GitHub
Yiwen Wu, Yang Zhang, Tao Wang, Huaimin Wang · 2019
In the GitHub platform, social media profile images are one of many visual components of developers. Besides, developer activities such as reporting issues or following other developers are regarded as important development and self-expression behaviors. However, to the best of our knowledge, no study has yet been conducted to study the relationship between GitHub developer activities and profile images. In this paper, we aim to investigate the relationship between developer activities and profile images to gain some insights into the developers' internal properties. During our experiments, we manually classify profile images into seven categories. Next, we investigate the relationship between developer's demographic information and developer activity. Further, using logistic regression analysis, when controlled for various variables, we statistically identify and quantify the relationships between developer activities and profile image categories. We find that several profile image categories significantly correlate with developer's demographic information and activities. We also provide a rich resource of research ideas for further study. Our examination and analysis provide insights into the developers' internal properties when using different profile images. Moreover, this study is the first step in understanding the relationship between developer activities and profile images on GitHub.