Empirical Study on the Evolution of Developer Social Networks

Software development is incredibly complex. Specifically, open-source software (OSS) development requires developers to collaborate with each other to conduct their work. Because software systems are evolving with time, collaboration among software developers may affect the quality of evolved software. The OSS developer teams collaborate in various tasks, including communications, coordination, and making various social collaboration in the OSS projects (e.g., bug/issue report, discussion, code revisions, and so on) without access restriction, and all these activities are used to generate an implicit developer social network (DSN). The DSN that is based on a bug tracking system is one of the most important DSNs that reflect the real collaboration between developers. As the software system evolves, the DSN evolves. This paper describes an empirical study of the evolution of DSNs on OSS projects collected from GitHub. Four perspectives were used: social network analysis, DSN as an ecosystem, community evolution patterns, and the core-periphery structure. The results demonstrated the DSNs over time have followed the power law degree distribution with +1% or more as an increasing rate to be more fitting over time. DSNs over time are considered a small-world community. DSNs over time exhibits about 55% diversity with 75% of evenness between the developers to contribute in different OSS projects in the same environment. Moreover, DSNs over time have a few developers as core members and large developers as peripheral members. Finally, about 10% of developers changed their positions frequently over time.