How is Open Source Software Development Different in Popular IoT Projects?

From the software point of view, the development of IoT applications differs from other kinds of applications due to the specific features that the former exhibit. In this paper, we investigate how developers contribute to IoT applications in the Open Source Software (OSS) context, to gain a deeper understanding of how their work differs from that of non-IoT applications. To that end, we conducted a quantitative analysis of a broad set of the 60 most popular publicly available IoT and non-IoT projects on GitHub. By comparing how developers contribute to these projects, our analysis provides insight into the purpose and characteristics of the code, the behavior of the contributors, and the maturity of the IoT software development ecosystem. Results reveal significant differences between IoT and non-IoT application development, in terms of how applications are realized, in the diversity of developers' specializations, and in how code is reused. This work provides evidence about some Open Source IoT software development peculiarities to be considered by future research efforts aimed at better satisfying software engineering needs in the IoT scenario.