The DOI matches its Crossref record; 6 of the 6 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Latent social structure in open source projects
Abstract
Commercial software project managers design project organizational structure carefully, mindful of available skills, division of labour, geographical boundaries, etc. These organizational "cathedrals" are to be contrasted with the "bazaar-like" nature of Open Source Software (OSS) Projects, which have no pre-designed organizational structure. Any structure that exists is dynamic, self-organizing, latent, and usually not explicitly stated. Still, in large, complex, successful, OSS projects, we do expect that subcommunities will form spontaneously within the developer teams. Studying these subcommunities, and their behavior can shed light on how successful OSS projects self-organize. This phenomenon could well hold important lessons for how commercial software teams might be organized. Building on known well-established techniques for detecting community structure in complex networks, we extract and study latent subcommunities from the email social network of several projects: Apache HTTPD, Python, PostgresSQL, Perl, and Apache ANT. We then validate them with software development activity history. Our results show that subcommunities do indeed spontaneously arise within these projects as the projects evolve. These subcommunities manifest most strongly in technical discussions, and are significantly connected with collaboration behaviour.
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Cites
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The mirroring hypothesis: theory, evidence, and exceptions
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The promises and perils of mining git
Bird, C., Rigby, P. C., Barr, E. T., Hamilton, D. J., German, D. M., & Devanbu, P. (2009) · 2009 6th IEEE International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories · doi:10.1109/msr.2009.5069475 · Cited by 311
Self-citationUnderstanding Human-Machine Networks: A Cross-Disciplinary Survey
Tsvetkova, M., Yasseri, T., Meyer, E. T., Pickering, J. B., Engen, V., Walland, P., Lüders, M., Følstad, A., & Bravos, G. (2018) · ACM Computing Surveys · doi:10.1145/3039868 · Cited by 67
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Focus-shifting patterns of OSS developers and their congruence with call graphs
Xuan, Q., Okano, A., Devanbu, P., & Filkov, V. (2014) · Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering · doi:10.1145/2635868.2635914 · Cited by 27
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Metadata
- Authors
- Bird, C., Pattison, D., D'Souza, R., Filkov, V., & Devanbu, P.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of software engineering
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2008-11-09
- Pages
- 24-35
- OpenAlex
- W2149231960
- Cited by
- 276
- References
- 6
- FWCI
- 19.49
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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