GitQ- Towards Using Badges as Visual Cues for GitHub Projects

GitHub hosts millions of software repositories, facilitating developers to contribute to many projects in multiple ways. Most of the information about the repositories are text-based in the form of stars, forks, commits, and so on. However, developers willing to contribute to projects on GitHub often find it challenging to select appropriate projects to contribute or reuse due to the large number of repositories present on GitHub. Adding visual cues such as badges, to the repositories might reduce the search space for developers. Hence, we present GitQ, to automatically augment GitHub repositories with badges representing information about source code and project maintenance. Presenting GitQ as a browser plugin to GitHub, could make it easily accessible to developers using GitHub. GitQ is evaluated with 15 developers based on the UTAUT model to understand developer perception towards its usefulness. We observed that 11 out of 15 developers perceived GitQ to be useful in identifying the right set of repositories using visual cues generated by GitQ.