1 research outputs found
A systematic mapping study of developer social network research
Developer social networks (DSNs) are a tool for the analysis of community
structures and collaborations between developers in software projects and
software ecosystems. Within this paper, we present the results of a systematic
mapping study on the use of DSNs in software engineering research. We
identified 255 primary studies on DSNs. We mapped the primary studies to
research directions, collected information about the data sources and the size
of the studies, and conducted a bibliometric assessment. We found that nearly
half of the research investigates the structure of developer communities. Other
frequent topics are prediction systems build using DSNs, collaboration behavior
between developers, and the roles of developers. Moreover, we determined that
many publications use a small sample size regarding the number of projects,
which could be problematic for the external validity of the research. Our study
uncovered several open issues in the state of the art, e.g., studying
inter-company collaborations, using multiple information sources for DSN
research, as well as general lack of reporting guidelines or replication
studies.Comment: Accepted at the Journal of Systems and Softwar