Studies over the past decade demonstrated that developers contributing to open source software systems tend to self-organize in "emerging" communities. This latent community structure has a significant impact on software quality. While several approaches address the analysis of developer interaction networks, the question of whether these emerging communities align with the developer teams working on various subsystems remains unanswered. Work on socio-technical congruence implies that people that work on the same task or artifact need to coordinate and thus communicate, potentially forming stronger interaction ties. Our empirical study of 10 open source projects revealed that developer communities change considerably across a project's lifetime (hence implying that relevant relations between developers change) and that their alignment with subsystem developer teams is mostly low. However, subsystems teams tend to remain more stable. These insights are useful for practitioners and researchers to better understand developer interaction structure of open source systems.
翻译:过去十年的研究显示,为开放源码软件系统作出贡献的开发者往往在“新兴”社区中自我组织,这种潜在的社区结构对软件质量有重大影响。虽然有几种方法处理开发者互动网络的分析问题,但这些新兴社区是否与从事各种子系统的开发者团队保持一致的问题仍然没有答案。关于社会-技术一致性的工作意味着,从事相同任务或工艺品工作的人需要协调和交流,从而有可能形成更强的互动联系。我们对10个开放源码项目的实证研究表明,开发者社区在项目的一生中发生了很大变化(这意味着开发者之间的相关关系发生变化),而且它们与子系统开发者团队的配合程度基本较低。然而,子系统团队往往保持稳定。这些洞见有助于从业人员和研究人员更好地了解开放源系统的开发者互动结构。