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Classifying Developers into Core and Peripheral: An Empirical Study on Count and Network Metrics

  • Knowledge about the roles developers play in a software project is crucial to understanding the project's collaborative dynamics. In practice, developers are often classified according to the dichotomy of core and peripheral roles. Typically, count-based operationalizations, which rely on simple counts of individual developer activities (e.g., number of commits), are used for this purpose, but there is concern regarding their validity and ability to elicit meaningful insights. To shed light on this issue, we investigate whether count-based operationalizations of developer roles produce consistent results, and we validate them with respect to developers' perceptions by surveying 166 developers. Improving over the state of the art, we propose a relational perspective on developer roles, using fine-grained developer networks modeling the organizational structure, and by examining developer roles in terms of developers' positions and stability within the developer network. In a study of 10 substantial open-source projects, we found that the primary difference between the count-based and our proposed network-based core-peripheral operationalizations is that the network-based ones agree more with developer perception than count-based ones. Furthermore, we demonstrate that a relational perspective can reveal further meaningful insights, such as that core developers exhibit high positional stability, upper positions in the hierarchy, and high levels of coordination with other core developers, which confirms assumptions of previous work.

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Metadaten
Author:Mitchell Joblin, Sven Apel, Claus Hunsen, Wolfgang MauererORCiDGND
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/icse.2017.23
Parent Title (English):2017 IEEE/ACM 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Buenos Aires, Argentina, 20-28 May 2017
Publisher:IEEE
Document Type:conference proceeding (article)
Language:English
Year of first Publication:2017
Release Date:2022/05/05
First Page:164
Last Page:174
Institutes:Fakultät Informatik und Mathematik
Fakultät Informatik und Mathematik / Labor für Digitalisierung (LFD)
Begutachtungsstatus:peer-reviewed
research focus:Digitalisierung
Licence (German):Keine Lizenz - Es gilt das deutsche Urheberrecht: § 53 UrhG