Social Network Analysis for Global Software Engineering: Exploring Developer Relationships from a Fine-Grained Perspective

Abstract

Software development is a collaborative activity in which social relationships among those involved throughout the life cycle are paramount for achieving the project goals. For instance, communication with, awareness of, and trust in others are relevant and necessary to facilitate collaboration. The identification of social relationships and their patterns can help us to better understand the dynamics of a project team. This understanding is crucial when working in a global setting where members have to virtually establish relationships and collaborate with remote colleagues. Social network analysis allows us to reveal relationship patterns in a fine-grained level. This tutorial provides basic concepts and measures on social network analysis and discusses their application in global software engineering. Practicing on a dataset from a real distributed software project is also part of this tutorial. The tutorial is suitable for anyone interested in global software development and the social relationships established among software developers in distributed teams.