Context: Recently, fork-based development has shown to be an easy and straightforward technique to reuse thesource code of existing projects (upstream projects and their forks) in open source communities (for example,GitHub) and industry. This technique allows developers to tailor the existing forks to build their applicationsand thus reduce the development’s burden. Objective: However, when the number of forks of a given repository increases, it is difficult to manually maintain and keep track of the development activities across all existing forks. Consequently, this leads toredundant development activities and to lose the efforts of the developers and maintainers. In this article, anautomatic approach is proposed to overcome the above-mentioned problems. Method: The proposed approach incorporates a mathematical research technique called formal concept analysis with other proposed algorithms. Results: To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, it is applied on four software projects from different domains and sizes. The results show that the proposed approach gives promising results according to well-known metrics in the subject. Conclusion: Also, it significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art and gives developers in open source communities and industry a development overview about forks of a given repository.