Visualizing collaboration and influence in the open-source software community

Abstract

We apply visualization techniques to user profiles and repository metadata from the GitHub source code hosting service. Our motivation is to identify patterns within this development community that might otherwise remain obscured. Such patterns include the effect of geographic distance on developer relationships, social connectivity and influence among cities, and variation in projectspecific contribution styles (e.g., centralized vs. distributed). Our analysis examines directed graphs in which nodes represent users' geographic locations and edges represent (a) follower relationships, (b) successive commits, or (c) contributions to the same project. We inspect this data using a set of visualization techniques: geo-scatter maps, small multiple displays, and matrix diagrams. Using these representations, and tools based on them, we develop hypotheses about the larger GitHub community that would be difficult to discern using traditional lists, tables, or descriptive statistics. These methods are not intended to provide conclusive answers; instead, they provide a way for researchers to explore the question space and communicate initial insights.

A study on the geographical distribution of Brazil’s prestigious software developers

“…They found that developers are highly clustered and concentrated primarily in North America, and Western and Northern Europe. Heller et al [11] applied visualization techniques for analyzing the effect of geographic distance on developer relationships and social connectivity.…”

A Survey on Mining Software Repositories

“…The developers also have relations and a social network could be created among them. These networks are represented in graphs [176]. Table 5 shows some examples of basic relations which compose those graphs.…”

“…SNA is diversely adopted; Applying SNA to CVS [174], mining mailing list [177], graph visualization of developers' network [176], analyzing developer's blog [178], validation of SNA metrics [173]. As social networks are being actively constructed and a variety of media to communicate appear, social network analysis in MSR is challengeable in the future.…”

Orion: A system for modeling, transformation and visualization of multidimensional heterogeneous networks

“…Using the GitHub web API, the researchers have collected over 1,000,000 million commits and 500,000 explicit "follower" connections among roughly 50,000 users. In addition, each user's location has been geocoded according to a self-reported location string and then mapped to near-by major metropolitan areas (see Heller et al [13] for more details).…”

“…We can then apply edge weight asymmetry and deviance statistics to examine differences among various locales. Figure 9 shows selected matrix views from this analysis (originally published in [13]). For example, in Fig.…”