Who can help to review this piece of code?

Abstract

Successful software projects require collaboration between team members. Efficient collaboration relies on both technical and social linkages. In this paper, we investigate whether a socio-technical analysis can support software contributors in identifying experts helping to review their source code. We mined the histories of five open source projects (OSS) from GitHub and examined both technical and socio-technical interactions based on Social Network Analysis (SNA). Mapping communication network to files co-edition network shows the existence of collaboration patterns between core teams and peripherals in the studied OSS projects. Our main contribution is the construction and mapping of three sources of social networks, in which contributors interact by co-editing, commenting or reviewing. We were able to identify behavioral patterns between core teams and peripherals related to the activity of code review. Our findings have implications on improving collaboration between contributors within virtual OSS communities witch drive teams’ performance and software products quality.