# A systematic mapping study of developer social network research

## TL;DR

This systematic mapping study reviews 255 research papers on developer social networks, highlighting research trends, common topics, data limitations, and open issues in the field of software engineering.

## Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of DSN research, mapping primary studies to research directions and identifying gaps and challenges in current methodologies.

## Key findings

- Nearly half of studies focus on community structure.
- Many studies use small sample sizes, affecting validity.
- Open issues include inter-company collaboration and data source diversity.

## Abstract

Developer social networks (DSNs) are a tool for the analysis of community structures and collaborations between developers in software projects and software ecosystems. Within this paper, we present the results of a systematic mapping study on the use of DSNs in software engineering research. 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.