A systematic mapping study of developer social network research
This study synthesizes existing research on DSNs for software engineering researchers, highlighting gaps and methodological concerns, but it is incremental as it maps rather than advances the field.
The authors conducted a systematic mapping study of 255 primary studies on developer social networks (DSNs) in software engineering, finding that nearly half focus on community structure, with other topics including prediction systems and collaboration behavior, and identified issues such as small sample sizes and lack of replication.
Developer social networks (DSNs) are a tool for the analysis of community structures and collaborations between developers in software projects and software ecosystems. Within this paper, we present the results of a systematic mapping study on the use of DSNs in software engineering research. We identified 255 primary studies on DSNs. We mapped the primary studies to research directions, collected information about the data sources and the size of the studies, and conducted a bibliometric assessment. We found that nearly half of the research investigates the structure of developer communities. Other frequent topics are prediction systems build using DSNs, collaboration behavior between developers, and the roles of developers. Moreover, we determined that many publications use a small sample size regarding the number of projects, which could be problematic for the external validity of the research. Our study uncovered several open issues in the state of the art, e.g., studying inter-company collaborations, using multiple information sources for DSN research, as well as general lack of reporting guidelines or replication studies.