Social network analysis of communication in open source projects

Abstract

In agile methodologies communication is a fundamental value because understanding communicational practices keeps together all the different aspects that improve team performance. In Open Source (OS) teams communication is also important because of the nature of the communities. We present a study of Mailing Lists (MLs) of some of the most successful OS projects to analyse their communicational flow. We adopted Social Network Analysis (SNA) approach to quantitatively describe these communities and to evaluate the communicational practices. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008.