From Developer Networks to Verified Communities: A Fine-Grained Approach

Joblin M, Mauerer W, Apel S, Siegmund J, Riehle D (2015)


Publication Type: Conference contribution, Original article

Publication year: 2015

Journal

Publisher: IEEE

Edited Volumes: Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering

Book Volume: 1

Pages Range: 563-573

Conference Proceedings Title: Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering

Event location: Firenze, Italy IT

ISBN: 9781479919345

URI: http://dirkriehle.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/1934a563.pdf

DOI: 10.1109/ICSE.2015.73

Abstract

Effective software engineering demands a coordinated effort. Unfortunately, a comprehensive view on developer coordination is rarely available to support software-engineering decisions, despite the significant implications on software quality, software architecture, and developer productivity. We present a fine-grained, verifiable, and fully automated approach to capture a view on developer coordination, based on commit information and source-code structure, mined from version-control systems. We apply methodology from network analysis and machine learning to identify developer communities automatically. Compared to previous work, our approach is fine-grained, and identifies statistically significant communities using order-statistics and a community-verification technique based on graph conductance. To demonstrate the scalability and generality of our approach, we analyze ten open-source projects with complex and active histories, written in various programming languages. By surveying 53 open-source developers from the ten projects, we validate the authenticity of inferred community structure with respect to reality. Our results indicate that developers of open-source projects form statistically significant community structures and this particular view on collaboration largely coincides with developers' perceptions of real-world collaboration.

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How to cite

APA:

Joblin, M., Mauerer, W., Apel, S., Siegmund, J., & Riehle, D. (2015). From Developer Networks to Verified Communities: A Fine-Grained Approach. In Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering (pp. 563-573). Firenze, Italy, IT: IEEE.

MLA:

Joblin, Mitchell, et al. "From Developer Networks to Verified Communities: A Fine-Grained Approach." Proceedings of the The 37th International Conference on Software Engineering, Firenze, Italy IEEE, 2015. 563-573.

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