A Systematic Mapping Study of Developer Social Network Research

Abstract

The article "A systematic mapping study of developer social network research" published in the Journal of Systems and Software in 2020 presents the results of a systematic mapping study of the state of the art of developer social network research. Developer social networks (DSNs) are a tool for the analysis of community structures and collaborations between developers in software projects and software ecosystems. We identified 255 primary studies on DSNs. We mapped the primary studies to research directions, collected information about the data sources and the size of the studies, and conducted a bibliometric assessment. We found that nearly half of the research investigates the structure of developer communities. Other frequent topics are prediction systems build using DSNs, collaboration behavior between developers, and the roles of developers. Moreover, we determined that many publications use a small sample size regarding the number of projects, which could be problematic for the external validity of the research. Our study uncovered several open issues in the state of the art, e.g., studying inter-company collaborations, using multiple information sources for DSN research, as well as general lack of reporting guidelines or replication studies.