Dynamic analysis of communication and collaboration in OSS projects

Dynamic analysis of communication and collaboration in OSS projects

Pinzger, M.
Gall, H.C.

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Software Technology

2010-12-31

Software repositories, such as versioning, bug reporting, and developer mailing list archives contain valuable data for analyzing the history of software projects and its dynamics. In this chapter, we focus on the analysis of the communication and collaboration in software projects and present an approach that works on software archives with social network analysis techniques. Our tool called STNACockpit provides both, a meta-model to represent communication and collaboration and a graph visualization technique to interactively explore instances of the metamodel. These instances are reconstructed from CVS, Bugzilla, and mailing list data. In a case study with the Eclipse Platform Core project data we demonstrate that with STNA-Cockpit one can observe project dynamics for certain periods of time. This allows, for example, project managers to early identify communication bottlenecks, contributor and expertise networks, or to understand how newcomers can be integrated fast and efficiently into their team. Preprint accepted for publication in I. Mistrík et al. (eds.), Collaborative Software Engineering, 265 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:e3ef2ead-5064-43ce-b225-ece7aae846b0

Delft University of Technology, Software Engineering Research Group

1872-5392

Technical Report Series TUD-SERG-2010-017

Institutional Repository

report

© 2010 The Author(s) . Software Engineering Research Group, Department of Software Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Delft University of Technology