Facilitating social network studies of FLOSS using the OSSNetwork environment

Abstract

Open source projects are typical examples of successful distributed software development projects. Understanding how coordination in these projects takes place can provide important lessons to Software Engineering researchers and practitioners. This understanding has been achieved using different research methods, including, surveys, case studies and social network analysis. However, to conduct these studies each researcher needs to build his own infra-structure from the scratch, a time consuming and error-prone task. This paper aims to alleviate this problem by describing an environment, the OSSNetwork, which allows the automatic data collection of open source repositories. Data collected by the OSSNetwork is aimed to support the construction, visualization, and analysis of social networks. This environment is extensible, therefore facilitating empirical studies of open source projects. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.