Nalanda: a socio-technical graph platform for building software analytics tools at enterprise scale

Abstract

Software development is information-dense knowledge work that requires collaboration with other developers and awareness of artifacts such as work items, pull requests, and file changes. With the speed of development increasing, information overload, and information discovery are challenges for people developing and maintaining these systems. Finding information about similar code changes and experts is difficult for software engineers, especially when they work in large software systems or have just recently joined a project. In this paper, we build a large-scale data platform named Nalanda platform to address the challenges of information overload and discovery. Nalanda contains two subsystems: (1) a large-scale socio-technical graph system, named Nalanda graph system, and (2) a large-scale index system, named Nalanda index system that aims at satisfying the information needs of software developers.To show the versatility of the Nalanda platform, we built two applications: (1) a software analytics application with a news feed named MyNalanda that has Daily Active Users (DAU) of 290 and Monthly Active Users (MAU) of 590, and (2) a recommendation system for related work items and pull requests that accomplished similar tasks (artifact recommendation) and a recommendation system for subject matter experts (expert recommendation), augmented by the Nalanda socio-technical graph. Initial studies of the two applications found that developers and engineering managers are favorable toward continued use of the news feed application for information discovery. The studies also found that developers agreed that

Integrated Visual Software Analytics on the GitHub Platform

“…Lastly, there are some software analytics platforms that are deemed to be used for both use cases-serving both researchers and software developers-such as Microsoft CODEMINE [11]. Another example is Nalanda, which comprises a socio-technical graph and index system to support expert and artifact recommendation tasks [12]. As a main demarcation and apart from readily available tools, infrastructures, and full-featured external software analytics services, we propose an extension to visual software analytics by means of an integrated approach within the GitHub platform.…”

“…Of particular relevance is the analysis of git repositories [8], as widely used type of repositories, and GitHub as popular social coding platform [9]. Various platforms have been developed to provide software analytics services to stakeholders [10][11][12]. These analytics services either integrate directly into the Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline or they are to be operated externally [13].…”