research-article

Latent social structure in open source projects

Authors:

Christian Bird,

David Pattison,

Raissa D'Souza,

Vladimir Filkov,

Premkumar DevanbuAuthors Info & Claims

SIGSOFT '08/FSE-16: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of software engineering

Pages 24 - 35

https://doi.org/10.1145/1453101.1453107

Published: 09 November 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Commercial software project managers design project organizational structure carefully, mindful of available skills, division of labour, geographical boundaries, etc. These organizational "cathedrals" are to be contrasted with the "bazaar-like" nature of Open Source Software (OSS) Projects, which have no pre-designed organizational structure. Any structure that exists is dynamic, self-organizing, latent, and usually not explicitly stated. Still, in large, complex, successful, OSS projects, we do expect that subcommunities will form spontaneously within the developer teams. Studying these subcommunities, and their behavior can shed light on how successful OSS projects self-organize. This phenomenon could well hold important lessons for how commercial software teams might be organized. Building on known well-established techniques for detecting community structure in complex networks, we extract and study latent subcommunities from the email social network of several projects: Apache HTTPD, Python, PostgresSQL, Perl, and Apache ANT. We then validate them with software development activity history. Our results show that subcommunities do indeed spontaneously arise within these projects as the projects evolve. These subcommunities manifest most strongly in technical discussions, and are significantly connected with collaboration behaviour.

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Index Terms

Latent social structure in open source projects
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Collaboration in software development
      1. Programming teams
    2. Software verification and validation
      1. Process validation

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cover image ACM Conferences

SIGSOFT '08/FSE-16: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of software engineering

November 2008

369 pages

ISBN:9781595939951

DOI:10.1145/1453101

General Chair:
Mary Jean Harrold
Georgia Institute of Technology
,
Program Chair:
Gail C. Murphy
University of British Columbia

Copyright © 2008 ACM.

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Published: 09 November 2008

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SIGSOFT '08/FSE-16: SIGSOFT 2008 -16th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

November 9 - 14, 2008

Georgia, Atlanta

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