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Dynamic Analysis of Communication and Collaboration in OSS Projects

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Collaborative Software Engineering

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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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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Software Engineering Research Group, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands

    Martin Pinzger

  2. Software Evolution and Architecture Lab, Department of Informatics, University of Zurich, 8050, Zürich, Switzerland

    Harald C. Gall

Authors
  1. Martin Pinzger
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  2. Harald C. Gall
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Martin Pinzger .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Werderstr. 47, Heidelberg, 69120, Germany

    Ivan Mistrík

  2. Dept. Computer Science, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    John Grundy

  3. Donald Bren School of Information &, University of California, Irvine, Donald Bren Hall 5029, Irvine, 92697-3440, USA

    André Hoek

  4. Dept. Computer Science, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, 95064, USA

    Jim Whitehead

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© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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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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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-10293-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-10294-3

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