Mining and visualizing developer networks from version control systems

Abstract

Social network analysis has many applications in software engineering and is often performed through the use of visualizations. Discovery of these networks, however, presents a challenge since the relationships are initially not known. We present an approach for mining and visualizing networks of software developers from version control systems. It computes similarities among developers based on common file changes, constructs the network of collaborating developers and applies filtering techniques to improve the modularity of the network. We validate the approach on two projects from industry and demonstrate its use in a case study of an open-source project. Results indicate that the approach performs well in revealing the structure of development teams and improving the modularity in visualizations of developer networks.