Temporal visualization of collaborative software development in FOSS forks

Abstract

Software development in free and open source (FOSS) projects is a collective human activity. Software developers in these projects collaborate via FOSS informalisms, i.e. mailing list, bug repository and code repository. Analysing the human collaborative work of these software developers over a time period, e.g. five years, sheds light on the underlying structure and dynamics of how the software is being developed, how the project is led, who the influencers are, and how to achieve a state of sustainability. In this paper, we propose to use temporal social network analysis with temporal visualization to study the evolution and social dynamics of FOSS communities. With these techniques we aim to identify measures associated with unhealthy group dynamics, e.g. a simmering conflict, as well as early indicators of major events in the lifespan of a community. One dynamic we are especially interested in, are those of forked FOSS projects. We used the results of a study of forked FOSS projects by [Robles and Gonzalez-Barahona 2012] as the starting platform for our study, and tried to gain a better understanding of the evolution of these communities.