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Dynamic Analysis of Communication and Collaboration in OSS Projects

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Abstract

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 STNA-Cockpit provides both, a meta-model to represent communication and collaboration and a graph visualization technique to interactively explore instances of the meta-model. 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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.ickn.org/ickndemo/

  2. 2.

    http://www.mhonarc.org/

  3. 3.

    http://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/platform-core/

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Correspondence to Martin Pinzger .

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Pinzger, M., Gall, H.C. (2010). Dynamic Analysis of Communication and Collaboration in OSS Projects. In: Mistrík, I., Grundy, J., Hoek, A., Whitehead, J. (eds) Collaborative Software Engineering. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10294-3_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10294-3_13

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