Bringing out collaboration in software development social networks
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Product Focused Software Development and Process Improvement
An exploratory study on collaboration understanding in software development social networks
CRIWG'12 Proceedings of the 18th international conference on Collaboration and Technology
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In this article, we present a tool that is designed to investigate the collaboration network between actors in software development groups. Our approach uses data derived from the version control system SVN (subversion) to retrieve the collaboration structures using an elaborate refinement process. The software `SVN Network Analysis Tool' (SVNNAT) aims to reveal the strengths and properties of collaboration ties between the developers in order to analyze their productivity and their quality of work in a given constellation of a software development network. In contrast to an earlier version of SVNNAT, our current approach accounts for the specific structures of programming languages in software code to separate technical artifacts from the information about the actors' collaboration in the development network. The result of the evaluation process is a social network of software developers that can be analyzed using typical indicators of topology properties like betweenness, closeness, and degree centralization. In a further step such network analysis can be used to propose an efficient network structure for developers of newly designed software projects.