git2net - Mining Time-Stamped Co-Editing Networks from Large git Repositories

Data from software repositories have become an important foundation for the empirical study of software engineering processes. A recurring theme in the repository mining literature is the inference of developer networks capturing e.g. collaboration, coordination, or communication from the commit history of projects. Most of the studied networks are based on the co-authorship of software artefacts defined at the level of files, modules, or packages. While this approach has led to insights into the social aspects of software development, it neglects detailed information on code changes and code ownership, e.g. which exact lines of code have been authored by which developers, that is contained in the commit log of software projects. Addressing this issue, we introduce git2net, a scalable python software that facilitates the extraction of fine-grained co-editing networks in large git repositories. It uses text mining techniques to analyse the detailed history of textual modifications within files. This information allows us to construct directed, weighted, and time-stamped networks, where a link signifies that one developer has edited a block of source code originally written by another developer. Our tool is applied in case studies of an Open Source and a commercial software project. We argue that it opens up a massive new source of high-resolution data on human collaboration patterns.Comment: MSR 2019, 12 pages, 10 figure

The role of social networks in students’ learning experiences

The aim of this research is to investigate the role of social networks in computer science education. The Internet shows great potential for enhancing collaboration between people and the role of social software has become increasingly relevant in recent years. This research focuses on analyzing the role that social networks play in students’ learning experiences. The construction of students’ social networks, the evolution of these networks, and their effects on the students’ learning experience in a university environment are examined

Evolution of developer collaboration on the Jazz platform: A study of a large scale agile project

Collaboration is a key aspect of the agile philosophy of software development. As a software system matures over iterations, trends of developer collaboration can offer valuable insights into project dynamics. In this paper, we study evolution of developer collaboration for a large scale agile project on the Jazz platform. We construct networks of collaboration based on developer affiliations across comments on work items and file changes; and then compare parameters of such networks with established results from networks of scientific collaborations. The comparisons illuminate interesting facets of developer collaboration on the Jazz platform. Such perception helps deeper understanding of the role of interaction in agile projects, as well as more effective project governance.</p

A Method to Discover Digital Collaborative Conversations in Business Collaborations

Many companies have a suite of digital tools, such as Enterprise Social Networks, conferencing and document sharing software, and email, to facilitate collaboration among employees. During, or at the end of a collaboration, documents are often produced. People who were not involved in the initial collaboration often have difficulties understanding parts of its content because they are lacking the overall context. We argue there is valuable contextual and collaborative knowledge contained in these tools (content and use) that can be used to understand the document. Our goal is to rebuild the conversations that took place over a messaging service and their links with a digital conferencing tool during document production. The novelty in our approach is to combine several conversation-threading methods to identify interesting links between distinct conversations. Specifically we combine header-field information with social, temporal and semantic proximities. Our findings suggest the messaging service and conferencing tool are used in a complementary way. The primary results confirm that combining different conversation threading approaches is efficient to detect and construct conversation threads from distinct digital conversations concerning the same document