The analysis of social structures is important in many contexts, especially in Global Software Development (GSD), where various developers with diverse skills and knowledge are involved. In this sense, searching for essential members is a valuable task since they are fundamental to the network's evolution. With the main goal of identifying and monitoring these individuals, we propose a temporal analysis approach that explores the evolution of syntactic network aspects. We describe experiments based on popular projects on GitHub that consider a network modeled over consecutive time periods. The goals of this work are:
- Find essential developers in GSD contexts by tracking the evolution of active individuals in the network over time.
- Further explore the network with context knowledge in order to understand the semantic role of essential individuals in the network.
The database consists of some of the most popular projects on Github: Node.js, Kubernetes, and Symfony. All data obtained correspond to the period from 2010 to mid-2018. However, in the analysis, we opted to work with the most recent periods, from January 1st, 2017, to June 30th, 2018.
- The full database can be downloaded in: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1zCclYWc5CIKpR-xqZDTEI0u2X7018gz3
- Network partitions (over months): Folder instances
This work was published in the The 2020 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2020) -ask for the full paper-
- Files: Results of who are the core individuals after clustering using NetSCAN algorithm
- code: Code used in this work