Summary: To understand more about communication patterns in open source supply chains, Dr. Gail Murphy and Dr. Marc Palyart undertook a study of 1,227 public projects hosted on GitHub. I spoke with Dr. Murphy about the project and what it means for open source developers trying to generate visibility and community around their project. About Dr. Gail Murphy Dr. Murphy is a leading researcher on software evolution and tools. She brings to Tasktop extensive experience as a software developer and principal investigator of a large research group. In recognition of her research, Gail has been a keynote speaker at several software engineering conferences. She has received international awards, such as the AITO Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize, a University of Washington College of Engineering Diamond Award, and an ACM Distinguished Scientist award. Her national awards include the NSERC Steacie fellowship. Most notably, Gail was elected to be a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. This fellowship is the highest academic accolade in the sciences, humanities and arts bestowed in Canada. At the University of British Columbia, Gail is a professor in the Department of Computer Science, where she works on human-oriented software development tools to make software developers more efficient and effective, and associate dean (Research & Graduate Studies) in the Faculty of Science. About Dr. Marc Palyert Marc Palyart is a researcher in Software Engineering from the Software Practices Lab at the University of British Columbia. He holds a PhD from the University of Toulouse and a BSc (Hons) from the Dundalk Institute of Technology. When not in the lab you can find him wandering around the coastal mountains of British Columbia.
