What dynamic network metrics can tell us about developer roles

Abstract

Software development is heavily dependent on the participants of the process and their roles within the process. Each developer has his specific skills and interests and hence contributes to the project in a different way. While some programmers work on separate modules, others developers integrate these modules towards the final product. To identify such different groups of people one approach is to work with methods taken from social network analysis. To this end, a social network has to be defined in a suitable way, and appropriate analysis strategies have to be chosen. This paper shows how a network of software developers could be defined based on information in a software repository, and what it can possibly tell about roles of developers (and what not) in the process of the application server Tomcat.