Social network analysis in open source software peer review

Abstract

Software peer review (aka. code review) is regarded as one of the most important approaches to keep software quality and productivity. Due to the distributed collaborations and communication nature of Open Source Software (OSS), OSS review differs from traditional industry review. Unlike other related works, this study investigated OSS peer review pro- cesses from social perspective by using social network anal- ysis (SNA). We analyzed the review history from three typi- cal OSS projects. The results provide hints on relationships among the OSS reviewers which can help to understand how developers work and communicate with each other.