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A Preliminary Study on the Assignment of GitHub Issues to Issue Commenters and the Relationship with Social Smells

Background: GitHub is the world's largest software hosting platform. Its features affect millions of developers. Investigating the impact of GitHub features on software teams is essential to gain insights into features' usefulness. Objective: As a preliminary step in this direction, this paper explores the relationship between the use of one GitHub feature and the social structure of the projects that adopt the feature. We explore whether the feature is used and whether the feature is associated with positive or negative changes in the team's social structure. Method: In this paper, we report on a preliminary study of 13 projects that used the GitHub “assign issues to issue commenters” feature. We examine the social smells in the software teams before and after the introduction of this new feature using statistical and temporal analysis. Results: Our results indicate that the usage of this feature varied across the analyzed projects. We also find that social smells that reflect low or missing communications (Organizational Silo and Missing Links) decrease in most of the projects that used the feature consistently. Conclusion: The results suggest that the social structure of the teams has a positive relationship with the feature adoption. Still, future research should study the feature's impact (and its use cases) on other aspects and over longer time periods to learn its diverse and long-term benefits on the social structure of software projects.