Unveiling Collaboration Structures in Software Development Projects

We investigate the structures of collaboration in software development groups by analyzing the data derived from the versioning system SVN (subversion) for software projects of different types and sizes. Our research is part of the project “Economics of Networks in Information Systems” (EONIS) which aims to investigate the impact of network structures on the effectiveness of infrastructures, organizations and processes in the domain of information systems. The goal of this subproject in EONIS is to reveal the network topology of collaboration groups for development projects connected with proprietary software in industry as well as in open source software projects. For this purpose we have developed a software tool that is able to analyze the update data in SVN systems with respect to the changes in the software code and defined a collaboration coefficient that is able to express the strength of their relationship in terms of collaboration in the network. We present the first results from the analysis of an open source project with about 126 software developers by constructing a weighted network from a matrix representation of the collaboration coefficients that have been calculated for each pair of software developers.