Applying Social Network Analysis to the Information in CVS Repositories :: essays research papers

Applying cordial Network Analysis to the Information in CVS RepositoriesAbstractThe huge quantities of info available in the CVS repositoriesof large, long-lived libre (free, unresolved source) softwareprojects, and the many interrelationships among those dataoffer opportunities for extracting large amounts of valuable breeding about their structure, exploitation and informalprocesses. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of that informationrenders it almost unusable without foundering methodologieswhich highlight the relevant information for a givenaspect of the project. In this constitution, we propose the implement ofa well known set of methodologies (social internet analysis)for characterizing libre software projects, their evolutionover time and their internal structure. In addition,we show how we take hold utilize such methodologies to realcases, and extract some preliminary conclusions from thatexperience.Keywords source scratch repositories, visualization techniques, complex networks, libre software engineering1 IntroductionThe instruct and portrait of complex systems is anactive research area, with many interesting cleared problems.Special attention has been paid recently to techniques basedon network analysis, thanks to their power to capture someimportant characteristics and relationships. Network characterizationis widely used in many scientific and technologicaldisciplines, ranging from neurobiology 14 to calculatornetworks 1 3 or linguistics 9 (to mention justsome examples). In this paper we apply this kind of analysisto software projects, using as a base the data available intheir source code versioning sedimentation (usually CVS). Fortunately,most large (both in code size and number of developers)libre (free, open source) software projects maintainsuch repositories, and grant public access to them.The information in the CVS repositories of libre softwareprojects has been gathered and analyzed using severalmethodologies 12 5, except still many other attackes arepossible. Among them, we explore here how to apply sometechniques already cat valium in the traditional (social) networkanalysis. The proposed plan of attack is based on consideringeither modules (usually CVS directories) or developers(commiters to the CVS) as vertices, and the number of commoncommits as the weight of the link between any two vertices(see section 3 for a more detailed definition). This way,we end up with a weighted graph which captures some relationshipsbetween developers or modules, in which characteristicsas information flow or communities can be studied.There have been some other works analyzing social networksin the libre software world. 7 hypothesizes that the brass section of libre software projects can be modeled asself-organizing social networks and shows that this seemsto be true at least when studying SourceForge projects.6 proposes also a style of network analysis for libre softwareprojects, but considering source depend encies betweenmodules. Our approach explores how to apply thosenetwork analysis techniques in a more worldwide and