The Anatomy of Developer Social Networks

MPhil Thesis Defence


Title: "The Anatomy of Developer Social Networks"

By

Miss Qiaona Hong


Abstract

With the growing number of large scale software projects, software 
development and maintenance demands the close developer interactions. 
Having a thorough understanding of the group of developers is critical for 
improving software quality and reducing cost. In contrast to most 
commercial software endeavors, developers in open source software (OSS) 
projects enjoy more freedom to organize and contribute to a project in 
their own working style. Their interactions through various means in the 
project generate a latent developer social network (DSN). Examining the 
structure and evolution of these social networks as well as their 
similarities and differences from other more general social networks 
(GSNs) is of value to our software engineering community. It allows us to 
begin building an understanding of how well the findings from other fields 
based on GSNs could be applied to DSN. In this thesis, we compare DSNs 
with popular GSNs such as Facebook, Twitter, Cyworld (a large social 
network in South Korea), and the Amazon recommendation network. We found, 
for instance, that while most social networks exhibit power law degree 
distributions, DSNs do not. We also investigate the similarity and 
differences among the DSNs extracted using different social linkage 
indicators (e.g., co-occurrence in bug reports). The findings facilitate a 
better understanding of DSNs and provide useful references for researchers 
who study DSNs. In addition, we also examine how DSNs evolve over time, 
highlighting how events within a project (such as a release of new 
software or the departure of prominent developers) impact the structure of 
the DSNs, and observe the evolution of topological properties such as 
modularity and the paths of communities within these networks.


Date:			Friday, 11 January 2013

Time:			2:00pm – 4:00pm

Venue:			Room 3501
 			Lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Prof. Shing-Chi Cheung (Supervisor)
 			Dr. Raymond Wong (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Sunghun Kim
 			Dr. Charles Zhang


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