Paper Info
Title
Measuring the Effect of Social Communications on Individual Working Rhythms: A Case Study of Open Source Software
Abstract
This paper proposes novel quantitative methods to measure the effects of social communications on individual working rhythms by analyzing the communication and code committing records in tens of Open Source Software (OSS) projects. Our methods are based on complex network and time-series analysis. We define the notion of a working rhythm as the average time spent on a commit task and we study the correlation between working rhythm and communication frequency. We build communication networks for code developers, and find that the developers with higher social status, represented by the nodes with larger number of outgoing or incoming links, always have faster working rhythms and thus contribute more per unit time to the projects. We also study the dependency between work (committing) and talk (communication) activities, in particular the effect of their interleaving. We introduce multi-activity time-series and quantitative measures based on activity latencies to evaluate this dependency. Comparison of simulated time-series with the real ones suggests that when work and talk activities are in proximity they may accelerate each other in OSS systems. These findings suggest that frequent communication before and after committing activities is essential for effective software development in distributed systems.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1109/SocialInformatics.2012.17
Proceedings of the 2012 ASE International Conference on Social Informatics, SocialInformatics 2012
Keywords
Field
DocType
public domain software,individual working rhythms,oss,social communication,distributed systems,activity latencies,multiactivity time-series,open source software,social network,simulated time-series,commit task,individual working rhythm,work and talk,time-series,time-series analysis,software development,case study,working rhythm,multi-activity time-series,quantitative measures,oss system,communication network,communication frequency,committing rhythm,software engineering,time series,distributed processing,social communications,network theory (graphs),frequent communication
Data mining,Social network,Telecommunications network,Commit,Computer science,Complex network,Rhythm,Open source software,Software development,Interleaving
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
null
null
null
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4799-0234-7
12
0.61
References 
Authors
9
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Qi Xuan118726.85
Mohammad Gharehyazie2503.16
Premkumar Devanbu34956357.68
Vladimir Filkov4150375.32