Christoph Gote

Giuseppe Russo, Christoph Gote, Laurence Brandenberger et al.

In the U.S. Congress, legislators can use active and passive cosponsorship to support bills. We show that these two types of cosponsorship are driven by two different motivations: the backing of political colleagues and the backing of the bill's content. To this end, we develop an Encoder+RGCN based model that learns legislator representations from bill texts and speech transcripts. These representations predict active and passive cosponsorship with an F1-score of 0.88. Applying our representations to predict voting decisions, we show that they are interpretable and generalize to unseen tasks.

Christoph Gote, Ingo Scholtes, Frank Schweitzer

Data from software repositories have become an important foundation for the empirical study of software engineering processes. A recurring theme in the repository mining literature is the inference of developer networks capturing e.g. collaboration, coordination, or communication from the commit history of projects. Most of the studied networks are based on the co-authorship of software artefacts. Because this neglects detailed information on code changes and code ownership we introduce git2net, a scalable python software that facilitates the extraction of fine-grained co-editing networks in large git repositories. It uses text mining techniques to analyse the detailed history of textual modifications within files. We apply our tool in two case studies using GitHub repositories of multiple Open Source as well as a commercial software project. Specifically, we use data on more than 1.2 million commits and more than 25'000 developers to test a hypothesis on the relation between developer productivity and co-editing patterns in software teams. We argue that git2net opens up a massive new source of high-resolution data on human collaboration patterns that can be used to advance theory in empirical software engineering, computational social science, and organisational studies.

Christoph Gote, Ingo Scholtes, Frank Schweitzer

Data from software repositories have become an important foundation for the empirical study of software engineering processes. A recurring theme in the repository mining literature is the inference of developer networks capturing e.g. collaboration, coordination, or communication from the commit history of projects. Most of the studied networks are based on the co-authorship of software artefacts defined at the level of files, modules, or packages. While this approach has led to insights into the social aspects of software development, it neglects detailed information on code changes and code ownership, e.g. which exact lines of code have been authored by which developers, that is contained in the commit log of software projects. Addressing this issue, we introduce git2net, a scalable python software that facilitates the extraction of fine-grained co-editing networks in large git repositories. It uses text mining techniques to analyse the detailed history of textual modifications within files. This information allows us to construct directed, weighted, and time-stamped networks, where a link signifies that one developer has edited a block of source code originally written by another developer. Our tool is applied in case studies of an Open Source and a commercial software project. We argue that it opens up a massive new source of high-resolution data on human collaboration patterns.

Christoph Gote, Pavlin Mavrodiev, Frank Schweitzer et al.

Massive data from software repositories and collaboration tools are widely used to study social aspects in software development. One question that several recent works have addressed is how a software project's size and structure influence team productivity, a question famously considered in Brooks' law. Recent studies using massive repository data suggest that developers in larger teams tend to be less productive than smaller teams. Despite using similar methods and data, other studies argue for a positive linear or even super-linear relationship between team size and productivity, thus contesting the view of software economics that software projects are diseconomies of scale. In our work, we study challenges that can explain the disagreement between recent studies of developer productivity in massive repository data. We further provide, to the best of our knowledge, the largest, curated corpus of GitHub projects tailored to investigate the influence of team size and collaboration patterns on individual and collective productivity. Our work contributes to the ongoing discussion on the choice of productivity metrics in the operationalisation of hypotheses about determinants of successful software projects. It further highlights general pitfalls in big data analysis and shows that the use of bigger data sets does not automatically lead to more reliable insights.

Christoph Gote, Vincenzo Perri, Ingo Scholtes

Networks are frequently used to model complex systems comprised of interacting elements. While edges capture the topology of direct interactions, the true complexity of many systems originates from higher-order patterns in paths by which nodes can indirectly influence each other. Path data, representing ordered sequences of consecutive direct interactions, can be used to model these patterns. On the one hand, to avoid overfitting, such models should only consider those higher-order patterns for which the data provide sufficient statistical evidence. On the other hand, we hypothesise that network models, which capture only direct interactions, underfit higher-order patterns present in data. Consequently, both approaches are likely to misidentify influential nodes in complex networks. We contribute to this issue by proposing five centrality measures based on MOGen, a multi-order generative model that accounts for all indirect influences up to a maximum distance but disregards influences at higher distances. We compare MOGen-based centralities to equivalent measures for network models and path data in a prediction experiment where we aim to identify influential nodes in out-of-sample data. Our results show strong evidence supporting our hypothesis. MOGen consistently outperforms both the network model and path-based prediction. We further show that the performance difference between MOGen and the path-based approach disappears if we have sufficient observations, confirming that the error is due to overfitting.

Christoph Gote, Christian Zingg

Name disambiguation is a complex but highly relevant challenge whenever analysing real-world user data, such as data from version control systems. We propose gambit, a rule-based disambiguation tool that only relies on name and email information. We evaluate its performance against two commonly used algorithms with similar characteristics on manually disambiguated ground-truth data from the Gnome GTK project. Our results show that gambit significantly outperforms both algorithms, achieving an F1 score of 0.985.

Christoph Gote, Giona Casiraghi, Frank Schweitzer et al.

We propose a novel sequence prediction method for sequential data capturing node traversals in graphs. Our method builds on a statistical modelling framework that combines multiple higher-order network models into a single multi-order model. We develop a technique to fit such multi-order models in empirical sequential data and to select the optimal maximum order. Our framework facilitates both next-element and full sequence prediction given a sequence-prefix of any length. We evaluate our model based on six empirical data sets containing sequences from website navigation as well as public transport systems. The results show that our method out-performs state-of-the-art algorithms for next-element prediction. We further demonstrate the accuracy of our method during out-of-sample sequence prediction and validate that our method can scale to data sets with millions of sequences.