An automated approach to assess the similarity of GitHub repositories

Open source software (OSS) allows developers to study, change, and improve the code free of charge. There are several high-quality software projects which deliver stable and well-documented products. Most OSS forges typically sustain active user and expert communities which in turn provide decent levels of support both with respect to answering user questions as well as to repairing reported software bugs. Code reuse is an intrinsic feature of OSS, and developing a new system by leveraging existing open source components can reduce development effort, and thus it can be beneficial to at least two phases of the software life cycle, i.e., implementation and maintenance. However, to improve software quality, it is essential to develop a system by learning from well-defined, mature projects. In this sense, the ability to find similar projects that facilitate the undergoing development activities is of high importance. In this paper, we address the issue of mining open source software repositories to detect similar projects, which can be eventually reused by developers. We propose CrossSim as a novel approach to model the OSS ecosystem and to compute similarities among software projects. An evaluation on a dataset collected from GitHub shows that our proposed approach outperforms three well-established baselines.