Do Communities in Developer Interaction Networks align with Subsystem Developer Teams? An Empirical Study of Open Source Systems

TL;DR

This study investigates whether developer communities in open source projects align with subsystem teams, revealing low alignment and dynamic community structures that change over the project lifetime.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that developer communities often do not align with subsystem teams and that these communities are highly dynamic over time.

Findings

Developer communities change significantly over project lifetime.

Alignment between communities and subsystem teams is generally low.

Subsystem teams tend to be more stable than communities.

Abstract

Studies over the past decade demonstrated that developers contributing to open source software systems tend to self-organize in "emerging" communities. This latent community structure has a significant impact on software quality. While several approaches address the analysis of developer interaction networks, the question of whether these emerging communities align with the developer teams working on various subsystems remains unanswered. Work on socio-technical congruence implies that people that work on the same task or artifact need to coordinate and thus communicate, potentially forming stronger interaction ties. Our empirical study of 10 open source projects revealed that developer communities change considerably across a project's lifetime (hence implying that relevant relations between developers change) and that their alignment with subsystem developer teams is mostly low. However, subsystems teams tend to remain more stable. These insights are useful for practitioners and researchers to better understand developer interaction structure of open source systems.