Mining Task-Based Social Networks to Explore Collaboration in Software Teams

Abstract

Mining social networks from software repositories is becoming a popular research area. Mining approaches often use technical artifacts, such as source code, or communication artifacts, such as emails, to create social networks. The authors describe a repository-independent approach of mining task-based communication in social networks. In their approach, collaborative tasks that tools record in software engineering repositories provide the constructed networks' context that link developers' task-based social networks if they've communicated about a collaborative task. These social networks demonstrate the applicability of their approach through two research studies that mined the IBM Rational Jazz development repository. They then propose practical applications that utilize their approach to directly support development projects.