Integrating Research Testbeds into Social Coding Platforms

The adoption of social coding platforms among software developers is particularly high because it increases collaboration and productivity as well as code re-use. On the other hand research testbeds do not generally have such high adoption rate. The learning curve of adopting new technology represents an initial drop in performance before it increases. However this effect is unexpected by many users and there is a risk that they will abandon new technology before their performance increases. The main contribution of this paper is to introduce methodology to take advantage of the high adoption rate of social coding platforms to improve the adoption of research testbeds. The proposed approach is that a social coding platform serves as a common gateway to various testbeds since it is something many developers are comfortable with and thus the initial effort needed to start using the testbed is decreased and the probability that experimenters continue to use a testbed is higher.