SortingHat: Wizardry on Software Project Members

Abstract

Nowadays, software projects and in particular open source ones heavily rely on a plethora of tools (e.g., Git, GitHub) to support and coordinate development activities. Despite their paramount value, they foster to fragment members' contribution, since members can access them with different identities (e.g., email, username). Thus, researchers and practitioners willing to evaluate individual members contributions are often forced to develop ad-hoc scripts or perform manual work to merge identities. This comes at the risk of obtaining wrong results and hindering replication of their work. In this demo we present SortingHat, which helps to track unique identities of project members and their related information such as gender, country and organization enrollments. It allows to manipulate identities interactively as well as to load bulks of identities via batch files (useful for projects with large communities). SortingHat is a component of GrimoireLab, an industry strong free platform developed by Bitergia, which offers commercial software analytics and is part of the CHAOSS project of the Linux Foundation. A video showing SortingHat is available at https://youtu.be/724I1XcQV6c.