On Using Network Science in Mining Developers Collaboration in Software Engineering: A Systematic Literature Review
Mohammed Abufouda, Hadil Abukwaik

TL;DR
This systematic review examines how network science has been applied to analyze developer collaboration in software engineering, highlighting methodological issues and suggesting improvements for future research and practice.
Contribution
The paper provides a comprehensive analysis of existing studies, identifying common pitfalls and proposing guidelines for more valid and meaningful network analysis in software engineering.
Findings
Many networks used were not valid or did not reflect real relationships.
Measures applied were often unsuitable for the network types.
Results were frequently not validated statistically.
Abstract
The goal of this study is to identify, review, and analyze the published research works that used network analysis as a tool for understanding the human collaboration on different levels of software development. This study and its findings are expected to be of benefit for software engineering practitioners and researchers who are mining software repositories using tools from network science field. We conducted a systematic literature review, in which we analyzed a number of selected papers from different digital libraries based on inclusion and exclusion criteria. We identified primary studies (PSs) from 4 digital libraries, then we extracted data from each PS according to a predefined data extraction sheet. The results of our data analysis showed that not all of the constructed networks used in the PSs were valid as the edges of these networks did not reflect a real relationship…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
