On Using Network Science in Mining Developers Collaboration in Software Engineering: A Systematic Literature Review

International Journal of Data Mining & Knowledge Management Process (IJDKP) Vol.7, No.5/6, November 2017
On Using Network Science in Mining Developers
Collaboration in Software Engineering: A Systematic
Literature Review
Mohammed Abufouda and Hadil Abukwaik
University of Kaiserslautern, Department of Computer Science,
Kaiserslautern 67663, Germany
{abufouda,abukwaik}@cs.uni-kl.de
Abstract. Background: Network science is the set of mathematical frameworks, models, and measures that are
used to understand a complex system modeled as a network composed of nodes and edges. The nodes of a network
represent entities and the edges represent relationships between these entities. Network science has been used in
many research works for mining human interaction during different phases of software engineering (SE).
Objective: 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.
Method: 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.
Results: We identified 35 primary studies (PSs) from four 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 between the
entities of the network. Additionally, the used measures in the PSs were in many cases not suitable for the used
networks. Also, the reported analysis results by the PSs were not, in most cases, validated using any statistical model.
Finally, many of the PSs did not provide lessons or guidelines for software practitioners that can improve the software
engineering practices.
Conclusion: Although employing network analysis in mining developers’ collaboration showed some satisfactory
results in some of the PSs, the application of network analysis needs to be conducted more carefully. That is said,
the constructed network should be representative and meaningful, the used measure needs to be suitable for the
context, and the validation of the results should be considered. More and above, we state some research gaps, in
which network science can be applied, with some pointers to recent advances that can be used to mine collaboration
networks.
Keywords: Network Analysis, software engineering, developers collaboration, systematic lit-
erature review
1 Introduction
Network science is the set of mathematical frameworks, models, and measures that are used
to analyze a complex system modeled as a network. Since the seminal works of Watts and
Strogatz [54] and Barabási and Albert [6], the field of network science exploded in different
directions with a huge amount of measures, models, and applications for network analysis. Fields
like Biology, Social science, Physics, and Computer science contribute a lot to the network
science field, each from different perspectives. Other domains benefited from the measures
and tools provided in the field of network science, and software engineering is one of those
DOI: 10.5121/ijdkp.2017.7601 1

fields. Software engineering is a complex production system, in which humans are involved
in order to produce a software with some certain properties. One face of the complexity of
software engineering process is the interaction among developers who develop a software.
This complexity can be seen in many phases of the software engineering life cycle including
collaborative coding, bug fixing and tracking, communication in mailing lists, and many other
interactions. The interactions between developers can be seen as a network where the nodes are, in
most cases, the developers and the edges between these nodes are the interactions between them.
Having these interaction constructed as networks opens the way to use network science as an
effective tool to analyze these networks. In this work, we systematically review the application
of network analysis for the networks constructed from the collaboration interaction between
software developers.
1.1 Research Questions
The course of improving software engineering process, practices, and software quality is hard
and it get even harder when considering the human factor. To that end, a lot of work has(is) being
done and a lot of venues have been dedicated for mining the human artifacts (like developers’
collaboration and communication interactions) and the software artifacts (like the source code,
the requirements and specification documentation) in order to gain insights to improve the
software engineering. In this research, we aim at reviewing, evaluating, and providing future
directions for the use of network science in the area of software engineering specifically for the
collaboration between developers. Thus, this work has the following research questions:
◦ RQ1: How valid and reliable are the constructed networks? The main criterion for conduct-
ing good network analysis is to have a valid network, otherwise, any subsequent analysis
may be useless. Thus, this research question investigates the validity and the quality of the
constructed networks in the identified studies. Here, we explore the quality of the edges in
the constructed networks, like being a real or a proxy relationship, being aggregated over
time (longitudinal aggregation) and space (multiplex aggregation).
◦ RQ2: How valid and reliable is the use of network analysis measures? Network science is
noticeably multidisciplinary, which renders some measures not suitable for every network
and in every context. This research question investigates how meaningful the use of certain
measures for the constructed networks is. We also shed light on the unstated assumptions of
some of the measures that were used intensively in the primary studies.
◦ RQ3: How valid, reliable, and generalizable are the results reported by the primary studies?
In order to get the confidence regarding the significance of the reported results by any primary
study, a validation should be performed. This research question investigates the validation
status of the reported results that were based on using network analysis. We also explore the
generalizability of the reported results by examining the number of analyzed networks in
the study.
◦ RQ4: How are the results being reflected on the studied context? Having data is tempting to
start analysis, however, any analysis that does not provide actionable and useful insights for
the studied context should be avoided. This research question investigates whether the PSs
reflected the results on the studied context of software engineering or not.
◦ RQ5: What are the gaps in the research that can be further researched? Based on our
extracted data and our analysis results, we identify potential research directions to cover
existing gaps about where network analysis can be employed. The answer of this question
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should help in extending the body of the research in mining developers networks using
network analysis. Additionally, we provide some pointers to recent advances in the network
science that can be utilized.
1.2 Method
In this systematic literature review (SLR), we followed the guidelines provided by Kitchenham
and Charters [32]. They offer the most formal and strict review process we know in empirical
software engineering. Figure 1 abstracts the steps that we adapted from Kitchenham and Char-
ters [32] and implemented in this SLR. Based on these guidelines, we built our process model
for conducting the review. Figure 2 shows this model in detailed steps. In the following section,
we provide details about the model. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2
provides the definitions that will be used in this paper. Section 3 gives details about the followed
steps conducted in this SLR. Section 4 contains the results of the extracted data, while Section 5
provides the answers to the research questions. This paper concludes in Section 61.
Fig. 1: The systematic review steps(guidelines) adapted from Kitchenham and Charters [32]
Fig. 2: The systematic review process model followed in this SLR.
2 Definitions
In this section, we provide the definitions 2 required to proceed in this review. We also provide
information about how network analysis should be properly applied in order to get meaningful
1 The data of this SLR is available upon request.
2 We will stick to the terminology used in network science field to help researchers in software engineering in the
future in finding the related work more easily.
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results. The data extraction fields presented in Section 3.4 are based on the definitions in this
section.
An undirected network G = (V, E) is a tuple that is composed of two sets V and E, where
V is the set of nodes and E is the set of edges such that an undirected edge e is defined as
e = {u, v} ∈ E where u, v ∈ V . For a directed network
−→
G = (V,
−→
E ), a directed edge −→e is
defined as −→e = (u, v) where the node u is the source and the node v is the target. For undirected
networks, the Degree Centrality of a node w, deg(w), is defined as the number of nodes that are
connected to it, while for directed networks the in-degree and the out-degree are defined as the
number of edges in the network where the node w is the target and the source node, respectively.
The set of all neighbors of a node v is denoted as N(v). Graphs can be weighted, i.e., edges are
associated with a weight that reflects the intensity, frequency, or the distance between two nodes.
Thus, a weighted undirected network is defined as: G = (V, E, ω), where ω : E → R. Networks
whose nodes and edges are fixed over time are called static networks. Networks that consider the
temporality of nodes and edges are called dynamic or temporal networks, and normally denoted
as Gt(V, E), e.g, the network G at time point t.
2.1 Centrality measures
A set of measures is defined based on the definition of a network. The distance (reachabil-
ity) between two nodes u and v is defined as: d(u, v) which is the shortest path between the
two nodes. The diameter of a network is the maximal distance between any two nodes in
the network. The clustering coefficient of a node v is defined as: cc(v) = e(v)
deg(v)(deg(v)−1)/2
for directed networks and as: cc(v) = e(v)
deg(v)(deg(v)−1) for undirected networks. The network
density measures how many edges there are in the network compared to the maximum pos-
sible number of edges, and it is defined as: η(G) = 2m
n(n−1) for undirected networks, where
m = |E| and n = |V |. The networks with high density are called dense networks and those
with low density are called sparse networks. The betweenness centrality of a node v is defined
as: B(v) = s∈V (G) t∈V (G)
σst(v)
σst
, where σst(v) is the number of shortest paths between the
nodes s and t that includes the node v, while σst is the number of all shortest paths between the
nodes s and t. The closeness centrality of a node v is defined as: C(v) = ( w∈V (G) d(v, w))−1.
2.2 Bipartite networks
A special case of networks is the Bipartite networks (2-mode networks or affiliation networks),
which is defined as G(VL, VR, E), where V = VL ∪ VR, VL ∩ VR = φ, and E : VL → VR. The
bipartite networks are appropriate model when we want to model the interactions between two
disjoint entities, like developer and source code. A method called One Mode Projection (OMP)
is classically used to convert the bipartite networks into a unipartite network, where the nodes
in the projected network consists of only one type of nodes.
2.3 Multiplex
Networks can be Multiplex (Multi-layer, multilateral, etc.), where the interactions between the
nodes have many types, each can be represented as a different network. The formal definition of
this type of networks is: M = (G, C) where G = {Gα; α ∈ 1, · · · , M} is the set of all layers,
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each of them Gα ∈ G, Gα = (Vα, Eα) represents one type α of interactions. The inter-layer edge
C is defined as: C = {Eαβ ⊆ Vα × Vβ; α, β ∈ {1, · · · , M}, α = β} represents the number
of edges between the nodes from two different layers. Normally, when C = φ, the networks are
called multiplex, otherwise, it is called multilayer.
2.4 Null models and network motifs
Null models are graph models that are used to test the statistical significance of the results
obtained from an observed (constructed) network. Using a null model gives more confidence
and creditability to the conclusions of any network-based measures or models. Random Graphs
with the same degree sequence of the observed network are wildly used null model. Network
motif [49] is a subgraph that exists significantly higher than the corresponding null model.
Finding those motifs gives insights about the patterns that occur frequently in a network.
3 The procedures of the review
In this section, we provide a full description of the SLR process, which we followed in this
study. This process is illustrated in Figure 2. We started by defining the goal of the review, which
is a row version of the presented research questions in Section 1.1. Accordingly, we defined
the Quality Assessment (QA) items of the PSs and the Extraction Features (EF) items for the
analysis of the PSs. The search sources were then defined and the search terms where identified.
To add more strictness to the review, we followed the Quasi-Gold Standard method presented
by Zhang et al. [59] to select the appropriate search terms semi-systematically as full-systematic
term identification is hard to achieve and to reproduce. Having our search terms identified, the
search process was conducted on the defined search sources producing the raw primary studies.
The raw primary studies were checked by snowballing , which is a forward and backward citation
check. We did also a similarity check to find similar papers for each paper in the primary studies.
The similarity check is provided in some libraries’ search engine that enabled a library user to
see similar and related papers. Having the raw primary studies, we applied the inclusion and
exclusion criteria to get the final set of the primary studies.
3.1 Quasi-Gold Standard search
One challenge in performing a rigor SLR is to identify the search terms systematically. To the
best of our knowledge, the most rigorous method to attain high reproducibility is the Quasi-Gold
Standard (QGS) provided by Zhang et al. [59]. This method starts with manually identifying
a set of studies that are relevant to the SLR and a set of search terms. Then, the researchers
run the automatic search in the search libraries many times, in each run then, the quality of the
retrieved papers is evaluated. The evaluation is done by calculating the sensitivity of the search
result (i.e., the number of related studies found by the search divided by the number of QGS
studies). In each run, the search terms are updated by introducing new relevant terms until we
reach the targeted sensitivity, which should be 100% in the best situation. In our study, we did
manual identification of 50 related work as a QGS 3 from 8 related venues by searching their
proceedings in the last 10 years. The first run of the QGS search resulted in a sensitivity of
3 Please note that this number includes papers for using network analysis in minable software artifacts too as the
plan was to review the application of the network science in software engineering in general. However, we found
that splitting the results of the primary studies into two groups: (1) minable human aspects and (2) minable
software artifacts would be more appropriate for intensive analysis.
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68% with 16 missed papers out of the 50. After inspecting those missed papers, we updated the
search terms and reached 100% sensitivity from the second (and the last) run of the QGS search
method. The used search queries are in the provided data, and here is a sample of the query used
in the IEEE search library:
( "Document Title":software OR "Document Title":program OR "Document Title":evolution OR "Document Title":maintenance OR
"Document Title":architecture OR "Document Title":bug OR "Document Title":maintainability OR "Document Title":requirements
OR "Document Title":testing OR "Document Title":clone OR "Document Title":opensource ) and ("Document Title":graph OR
"Document Title":network OR "Document Title":tree OR "Document Title":analysis OR "Document Title":collaboration OR "Doc-
ument Title":call OR "Document Title":interaction)
Libraries search engine Row primary studies Initial primary studies Primary studies
ACM 1992 50 15
IEEEXplor 2500 124 15
Springer digital library 1553 15 3
Elsevier ScienceDirect 113 8 2
Wiley open access 35 2 0
Sum 6080 199 35
Table 1: The selection process of the primary studies across the selected libraries. The row primary studies were title-abstract
sifted, then the inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied on the initial primary studies resulting in the PSs.
3.2 Search libraries and In(Ex)clusion criteria
We identiﬁed the following search libraries as a basis for the search process. The libraries are:
(1) The ACM digital library, (2) The IEEExplore, (3) The Springer, and (4) The ScienceDirect.
The initial studies resulted from the search process was 6080 that we sifted based on the title
and the abstract content. The result was 199 related initial primary studies that we read in order
to apply the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Table 1 and Figure 3 show more details about the
number of selected studies in each step across the search libraries.
Fig. 3: The percentages of the number of primary studies across the used libraries.
Table 2 shows the inclusion criteria. Any included study should satisfy all of the inclusion
criteria in the table. Table 3 shows the exclusion criteria along with the number of excluded
studies due to each exclusion criterion.
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Figure 4 shows the distribution of the number of primary studies and their publication year. The
Inclusion item Description
I1 Research that uses network analysis in studying software engineering practices or artifacts or processes.
I2 Empirical study that provides quantitative results.
I3 It covers minable human aspects and/or minable software artifacts
I4 It is a peer reviewed publications.
Table 2: The inclusion criteria applied in this SLR.
earlier primary study was published in 2005, a few years after the emergence of network science
papers.
Fig. 4: The distribution of the number of primary studies over years 2005-2015.
Exclusion item Description
E1 Any study that is not in English. (1)
E2 Replication studies, invited papers, lessons learned, technical papers, and position papers.
(5)
E3 Visualization tools, process engineering, and controlled experiment papers. (14)
E4 Theoretical models that have not been validated empirically with real systems. (10)
E5 Papers that do not cover the minable human aspects in software engineering. (41)
E6 Duplicated papers or initial work that has been extended later. (4)
E7 Papers that only construct networks from data without analysis. (8)
Table 3: The exclusion criteria along with the number of excluded studies due to each exclusion criterion.
After applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria, we got the following primary studies. For the
ACM digital library and the IEEE, we had 15 studies selected from each. For the SciencDirect
and the Springer, we had 3 and 2 primary studies, respectively. The included primary studies in
this SLR are shown in Table 4 along with their venues. Figure 5 shows the number of primary
studies per venue. The Others represents all venues with only one primary study. From Figure 5
and from Table 4, we noticed that major software engineering conferences like ICSE and FSE
have the highest number of primary studies. Also, from the information in the table and the
ﬁgure, we see that there is 31 primary studies published in conference proceedings and the rest,
4 studies, are published in journals.
3.3 Quality assessment
Performing quality assessment is important in SLRs in order to get insights regarding the
quality of the included PSs and to perform a proper analysis for them. We followed the method
presented in [22] for the quality assessment task. We restricted our quality assessment to the
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Digital library PS Year Venue4
ACM
[28] 2005 SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes
[42] 2005 SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes
[10] 2006 MSR
[12] 2008 FSE
[46] 2008 CHASE
[45] 2008 FSE
[37] 2008 FSE
[55] 2009 ICSE
[20] 2010 ISEC
[17] 2011 MSR
[11] 2011 FSE
[51] 2011 ISEC
[29] 2011 CHASE
[34] 2013 ISEC
[44] 2014 ICPC
IEEE
[48] 2008 ECECE
[9] 2009 ERE
[7] 2010 ICPC
[52] 2010 CRE
[27] 2011 ICSM
[36] 2011 ICSE
[25] 2012 ICGCC
[57] 2012 ICSE
[58] 2012 ICSI
[5] 2013 ASONAM
[16] 2013 CHSAE
[38] 2013 ICSM
[60] 2013 ICCSC
[8] 2014 ICSME
[30] 2015 ICSE
ScienceDirect
[50] 2006 EOSSD
[56] 2006 IST
[53] 2010 IST
Springer
[24] 2007 OSDAI
[21] 2013 Complex networks
Table 4: A summary of the identiﬁed primary studies in this SLR.
Fig. 5: The distribution of the number of primary studies over the venues.
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research quality of the PSs as the other aspects were covered in the data extraction in order
to answer the research questions in Section 1.1. We did not apply any exclusion based on the
quality of the PSs as this will limit our ability to answer the research question properly.
Code Addresses Description
QA1 Research Design The study provides a clear research design that includes research goals, hypotheses and other
aspects of research design.
QA2 Data Collection The study provides a clear information about the data used in the analysis and how it was
collected and validated.
QA3 Threats to Validity (or
Limitation)
The study provides the threats that affect the validation of the study including internal, external,
and construction threats.
QA4 Empirical Results Inter-
pretation
The study provides sufficient and thorough interpretation of the results.
QA5 Reflections on SE The study reflects and links the results to the studied aspects of software engineering.
QA6 Reproducibility The study provides sufficient information to reproduce the experiments. E.g., links to the
datasets, the steps in details...etc.
Table 5: The quality assessment items. The evaluation of each item can take a descriptive value from Explicit, Implicit, or None
with numeric values 1, 0.5, or 0.
Based on the defined quality criteria shown in Table 5, we got the quality scores for all of
the primary studies as shown in Table 6. The average quality score for all primary studies is
3.9 out of 5. The retrieved primary studies from the IEEE library have, on average, higher
quality than the studies from the other libraries. The average quality scores for the primary
studies retrieved from the ACM, ScienceDirect, and the Springer libraries are 3.9, 3.2, and 2,
respectively. The results of quality assessment show that there are 5 PSs with quality score 6,
which is the maximum, out of the 35 primary studies. The lowest quality score was 0.5 for
only one primary study. We also calculated the average score for each quality aspect shown in
Table 5. The table shows that the average value for the quality assessment item QA6 was the
lowest among the other quality assessment items, while the highest average value was for QA4.
We found a 0.4 positive correlation, using the R2 coefficient, between the quality of the primary
studies published in the IEEE over time. This correlation was insignificant for the other libraries.
Figure 6 shows the distribution of the quality scores of the primary studies.
Fig. 6: The distribution of the number of primary studies over the quality scores.
4 The full name of the venue can be found in the references.
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PS
Quality Aspect
Quality scoreQA1 QA2 QA3 QA4 QA5 QA6
[55] 1 1 1 1 1 0.5 5.5
[51] 0.5 0 0 0 0 0 0.5
[46] 0.5 0.5 0 0.5 0 0 1.5
[45] 1 0.5 1 1 1 0 4.5
[44] 1 1 1 1 1 1 6
[42] 0 1 0 0.5 1 0 2.5
[37] 0 1 1 0.5 0.5 1 4
[34] 0.5 1 1 1 1 0 4.5
[29] 0.5 1 1 0.5 0 0 3
[28] 0.5 0 0 0.5 0.5 0 1.5
[20] 1 1 0 1 1 0.5 4.5
[17] 1 1 1 1 1 1 6
[11] 1 1 0 1 1 0.5 4.5
[12] 1 1 1 1 1 0.5 5.5
[10] 1 1 0 1 0.5 0 3.5
[60] 1 1 1 1 1 1 6
[58] 0 1 0 1 1 0.5 3.5
[57] 1 1 1 1 1 0.5 5.5
[52] 1 1 0 0 0 0.5 2.5
[48] 0.5 0 0 1 0 0 1.5
[38] 0.5 0.5 0 1 0.5 0.5 3
[36] 1 1 1 1 1 1 6
[30] 1 1 1 1 1 1 6
[27] 1 0 1 1 0.5 0 3.5
[25] 1 0.5 1 1 1 0.5 5
[16] 1 0 1 1 1 0 4
[9] 1 0.5 0 0.5 0.5 0 2.5
[8] 1 1 1 1 1 0.5 5.5
[7] 0.5 1 1 1 1 1 5.5
[5] 1 1 0 1 0.5 0.5 4
[53] 0.5 0.5 0 1 1 0 3
[50] 0.5 1 1 1 1 1 5.5
[56] 0 0.5 0 1 0 0.5 2
[24] 0 0 0 1 0.5 0 1.5
[21] 0 1 0.5 0.5 0 0.5 2.5
Avg. 0.69 0.7 0.53 0.84 0.7 0.4 3.9
Table 6: The quality assessment of the primary studies.
3.4 Data extraction and synthesis
Data synthesis for heterogeneous studies is always hard, particularity when the primary studies
cover the same aspect with different measurements and present the results in different ways. Also,
the primary studies in most cases use a mixed-methods for the analysis that makes a universal
comparison impossible. Thus, we followed a meta-ethnography method [15], as advised by Silva
et al. in [19], which translates the quantitative findings of the PSs into comparable features that
can be used for a proper analysis. Thus, we invested a lot of time during the execution of this SLR
in designing a good set of features to be extracted from the primary studies in order to answer
the research questions. Table 7 shows the set of features extracted from each primary study.
Features in category "A" are documentary features that capture the general goal of each primary
study. For space limitation, we will discuss few of them in the following. Feature "A1" in this
review has the same value (i.e., Human Aspects that is the main topic of this review). Feature
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"A2" represents the SE context that the proposed network analysis method serves, for example,
how can we do bug assignment by analyzing the developers collaboration network?. Feature
"A3" captures the network being used in each PS. Features of category "B" address the network
analysis aspects of the PSs, and features of category "C" address the other aspects. Features
"B1" to "B6" address questions about the constructed network type. This is an important step
towards understating how valid the constructed networks are, which is covered in features "B7"
to "B10". Feature "B7" reflects how good an edge is. Real edges are real connections between
the nodes. A proxy edge is used when the real edge is hard to obtain. For example, changing
a file, a module, or any software artifact may not yield a real relationship. Instead, we call this
interaction a proxy. An example of a real edge is the edges constructed in the communication
email networks, in which the edge and its direction are explicitly found in reality. Having clear
idea about the constructed network, we can check the validity of the used measures and their
meaningfulness. Features "B11" to "B13" address the used measures in each PS. Feature "B12"
is important and it reflects whether the meaning of the used measures is sufficiently explained
or not, and if the explanation exists, whether it is meaningful or not. The feature "B14" tests
whether the results in each PS are validated or not.
The extraction features in Table 7 are designed to be mapped to the research questions in
Section 1.1. Extraction features "B1" to "B10" give us rich information that enable obtaining
strong evidence regarding the quality of the constructed networks addressed in RQ1. Features
"B11" to "B13" answer RQ2, while the feature "B14" is mapped to RQ3. Features "C1" to "C4"
answer RQ4. The answers of the first four research questions enable us to answer RQ5.
Key Description
A1 Human aspects or software artifact aspects
A2 The addressed context. Examples: bug tracking and team formation.
A3 What is the constructed network? Examples: Developer-Module network and social networks of developers.
B1 What is a node?
B2 What is an edge?
B3 Is the network multiplex (Multilayer)?
B4 Is the network bipartite (2-mode networks)?
B5 Is the network dynamic or static?
B6 Is the network directed or undirected ?
B7 Edge quality.
B8 Is the used network aggregated from multiplex interactions?
B9 Is the used network aggregated from longitudinal networks?
B10 Are edge weights (like collaboration intensity/frequency) considered?
B11 What are the used measures?
B12 Are the meaning of the used measures explained?
B13 Does the work contribute new measures, tools, models, and algorithms that are based on network analysis?
B14 Does the work use any Null Model to validate the results?
C1 Data source project. Open source and/or industry
C2 The analyzed project(s)
C3 Link the results and interpret them in the context of SE, i.e., A2
C4 Practical implications, for examples, lessons or advice for practitioners
Table 7: The extraction features of the SLR.
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4 Results
In this section, we will provide the synthesized results, while we provide an evidence-based
answers to the research questions in Section 5.
4.1 From SE to a network (Fields A)
In this section, we provide the results for the extraction features "A1" to "A3". As per the
inclusion and exclusion criteria described in Section 3.2, all of the included PSs were handling
Human Aspects of software engineering. Thus, the 35 PSs had that value in that field. Feature
A2 had different values that handled different contexts of SE. There are 8 PSs that handled
Bug related issues like bug assignment, bug tracking and bug prediction. Other PSs addressed
different contexts like Build Failure, Code Ownership, Team Organization, Failure Prediction,
Code Quality, and Team Collaboration.
Figure 7 shows the used networks in the PSs. The most used network, in 15 PS, was the
Collaboration Network where the nodes were developers and an edge appeared between any
two developers if they worked together on the same file, line of code, module, or project. If the
collaboration network was based on more than one type of interaction between the developers,
then this was a one-mode projection from a multiplex bipartite network. The Communication
network was constructed by modeling the developers as nodes and the edges were communication
messages between developers. The Developer-project network was a bipartite network where
the two sets VL and VR were the developers and the projects, respectively, and the edges
represented developers taking part in a project. Similarly, the Developer-module network was
a bipartite network between developers and the modules. Those two networks were found in
7 primary studies, [45,42,11,9,56,24,21]. The Follow network was the social network of the
Github platform where a developer could explicitly follow another one, like Twitter. The other
two networks, the Hierarchical and Repository networks were devised and contributed networks
of the works in [5,38], respectively.
Fig. 7: The constructed networks in the PSs and their frequencies.
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4.2 The constructed networks, their validity, and measures validation (Features B)
Not surprisingly, the nodes in the majority of the networks of the PSs were Contributors, which
means any human who contributed to a software repository, like a developer, a tester, an archi-
tect, etc. An exception to this was the work in [38,9,56,24,21] where the nodes were two sets
of a bipartite network and the analysis was done on the constructed bipartite network, not on a
one-mode projected network.
For feature "B3", there were 3 PSs, [11,60,8], where the constructed network was a multiplex
network. Additionally, only 5 PSs, [46,34,58,25,53], considered the temporality of a network
and provided a dynamic network. The rest of the primary studies considered a static network.
The PSs that considered directed networks were 13 PSs, [55,17,10,60,57,48,38,30,9,8,5,53,50]
and the rest PSs considered an undirected network. We found that 60% of the PSs, 21 PSs, used
a proxy edge. Only 5 PSs, [55,46,44,8,56], used a multiplex representation of the network. The
rest used a unipelx network. Nearly 89% of the PSs aggregated the networks over time and used
a single static network, only 4 primary studies, [46,34,58,25] considered different networks of
the same nodes over time and performed analysis based on this situation. For feature "B10",
only 13 PSs considered the weights of the edges, while the other 22 PSs did not consider the
edge weights.
The used measures in the PSs are shown in Figure 8. The figure shows that the Degree and the
Betweenness centrality measures were dominant among the used measures with 21 and 17 times
used in the PSs, respectively. Motif analysis was used only once in the work [52]. The measures
in "Others" are measures that were used only one time across the PSs. For the feature "B12", we
Fig. 8: The used measures in the PSs and their frequencies.
found that 11 PSs did not provide sufficient definition and explanation for the used measures, and
only 9 PSs, [45,44,11,60,58,38,30,16,8], contributed (devised) new measures and(or) models for
the constructed networks. Surprisingly, we found only 14%, 5 PSs out of the 35, that used a Null
model to validate the results. The rest of the PSs did not use any statistical validation of the results.
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4.3 Data, results, and interpretation (Feature C)
The used data set in the PSs was distributed as follows: (1) 6 PSs used data from industry, (2) 27
PSs used data from open source platforms, and (3) 2 PSs, [9,29], used both industry and open
source data in the experiments. From the open source project, the projects Mozilla, Apache,
Eclipse, and Linux were used much often. For the industry projects, the MS-Vista binaries were
used 2 times by the same author in [11,45]. The MS-Vista binaries was used also in addition to
an open source project (i.e., the Eclipse) in the work [9]. Two PSs did not provide information
about the used industrial data [20,16]. The projects Eclipse, Firefox, and Apache were used the
most in the PSs with frequencies 7, 6, and 4 times, respectively. The answer to feature "C3"
found as follows. Only 34% of the PSs, 12 PSs, provided an Explicit interpretation of the results
in the context of the studied context of SE, feature "A2". Other 14 studies provided Implicit
interpretation of the results, which means it was not clear in the primary study how the context
in "A2" was related to the results directly. The rest of the results, 9 PSs, did not provide any
information about connecting the results to feature "A2".
The PSs that provided Explicit lessons and guidelines for the practitioners based on the results of
the study were 5 studies only, [55,45,44,11,12]. Also, 4 studies [42,17,7,53] provided Implicit
lessons and guidelines for the practitioners, and the rest did not provide any information.
5 Discussions
In this section, we discuss the results presented in Section 4, and provide answers to the research
questions in Section 1.1.
5.1 Discussion around RQ1:
To answer this question, we need to test the quality of the constructed network. To that end, we
will use the results of features "B1" to "B10" to answer this question. The quality of the network
stems from the quality of its components (i.e., the nodes and the edges) and on the other aspects
we mentioned in the definition section like being weighted, multiplex, or bipartite. Based on the
results, we found that 60% of the PSs used a proxy edge. A proxy edge is obtained by doing one
(or more) of the following:
– Classical OMP: which was described in the Section 2. The PSs [21,24,56,8,42,53] did
classical OMP, which does not respect the edge weights. That means, the links between
any two developers, for example, in the network who collaborated 1 time or 1000 times are
treated equally. The resulted network is not informative and a lot of measure, like the degree
centrality, do not provide meaningful results for the projected networks if the weights are
ignored.
– Multiplex(space) aggregation: In this type of aggregation, like PSs [8,12,53,55,44,56], the
edges are aggregated from different types of relationships(interactions). This results in
a dense disguised network, in which the link do not reflect any special interaction that
can be meaningfully quantified. Edge aggregation from different types of interactions is
an oversimplification of reality, which yields wrong conclusions as shown by Cardillo et
al. [18].
– Temporal(time) aggregation: In this type of aggregation, like the
PSs [42,37,29,28,20,12,48,38,36,30,27,8,7,53,50,56,24,21], the edges are aggregated over
time into a single network.
14

The problem of the previous classical OMP and the aggregations is that it generates a very
dense graphs, where every node is almost connected to every other node in the network. This
renders many measures, like the degree centrality, not of much benefit. Some researchers were
aware of this problem and included this as a threat to validity in their work, like the PS [29].
Additionally, the bipartite networks, the dynamic networks, and the multiplex networks have
their special characteristic that differs from the unipartite static network. Thus, converting any
non-unipartite, non-static, or multiplex network into a unipartite static network should be done
with extreme care if required, and generally we recommend keeping the network in its nature.
Additionally, the collaboration intensity (or frequency) was not considered when it should be.
There are 22 PSs that did not consider the weights of the edges in the graph where the weights
are crucial. Thus, our answer to the RQ1 is: In 60% of the PSs, the constructed networks are not
of sufficient quality to be used as a model for the studied context. Accordingly, we believe that
rigorous validation need to take place for the subsequent analysis results of those PSs.
To address the problems found in the PSs for this research question, we provide here some
pointers to extend the space of the used methods. For example, the work by Zweig [62] provides
a systematic method to do a proper one mode projection, the works by Kivelä et al. [33] and by
Boccaletti et al. [13] provide a good resource for the methods, the models, and the measures that
can be used to analyze the multiplex networks, and the seminal work by Holme and Saramäki [26]
provide frameworks, measures, and methods for the temporal networks (dynamic networks).
To answer this question, we will provide a discussion on the used measures in the PSs, and
extensively talk about one of them, which is the betweenness centrality that was used too much.
Borgatti [14] showed that many of the centrality measures embraced unstated assumptions that
once were not satisfied, the results of the measures could not be reliable and interpretable. For
space limitation, we will discuss the betweenness centrality that was used 16 times in the PSs.
This centrality measure was introduced by Freeman [23] and implicitly assumed that: (1) there
is a process going on top of the network, (2) the process is based on the shortest paths, (3) the
process takes place among all pairs of nodes with the same frequency, and (4) the process is
sequential [61]. Thus, any network where those assumptions are not met can not benefit from
the betweenness centrality as a measure for identifying central nodes. Based on this information
and the information provided in Section 5.1, none of the networks in the PSs is suitable to apply
the betweenness centrality on it. Any obtained results based on this measure and these networks
are not meaningful. Similar situations to this are also found with other measures. For example,
the diameter of the network and the closeness centrality do not give an informative value in
the analysis of a social interaction. Those measures are informative in networks where the cost
of establishing an edge is high, like adding new street in the street networks and adding new
DNS server in the internet network. However, for communication and social networks where an
edge is a sent email, and for the collaboration networks where the edge is a repository fork or a
comment added to the code, the diameter, for example, is just meaningless and does not provide
a value to the analysis. In addition, only 9 PSs, [45,44,11,60,58,38,30,16,8], contributed a new
model or a new measure based on the specifics of the used networks, the other 26 PSs only used
an existing measure in the literature. Also, 11 primary studies did not provide an explanation and
interpretation over the used measure. Thus, our answer to RQ2 is: In at least 25 PSs, the used
measures were not suitable and were not reliable. Also, in 11 PSs, the provided measures were
15

not sufficiently explained in the context of used network. Thus, the results of those PSs need a
proper justification for their usage validity. To tackle this issue, we recommend designing models
and devising measures for each constructed network if the existing methods and measures are not
suitable. In the primary studies covered in this SLR, there are 9 PSs, [45,44,11,60,58,38,30,16,8],
that provided new measures and models specifically for the constructed network that respected
the nature of the modeled system.
Classically, the random graphs null models are used to validate the significance of the results
obtained from networks. For our PSs, only 14% of them, 5 PSs,[11,12,30,27,16], out of the 35,
used a Null model to validate the results. The rest of the PSs used no validation method at all.
We noticed that those studies used the random graphs null model to validate the quality of the
found clusters (community). Thus, our answer to the RQ3 is: The results of 86% of the PSs in
this SLR were not validated at all. Accordingly, the reported results of these studies may not
be reliable. To overcome this issue, we provide here some pointers for the null models used to
validate the significance of the results. Newman [40] provided a description of using random
graphs as a null model. The work by Schlauch et al. [47] provided a comprehensive comparison
between different null models.
We noticed that 37% of the PSs, 3 out of 8, used industry data sets and 24% of the PSs, 7 out
of 29, used open source data sets provided Explicit lessons and guidelines for the practitioners.
Based on that and on the results provided in Section 4.3, our answer to the RQ4 is: Translating
the results of the analysis into the studied context of SE is poor. Also, the number of PSs that
provided lessons and guidelines for practitioners is very limited.
RQ5 has been partially answered after answering RQ1, RQ2, RQ3, and RQ4. Here we elaborate
more on the answer for RQ5 based on the results in Section 4 and based on the answers to the
research questions in Sections 5.1 to 5.4. Another contribution in this paper is the following
items that may help the researchers to further extend the body of the work in mining software
repositories using network science.
1. Temporal measures: As we saw in the previous sections, the constructed networks were in
many times aggregated over time and the static measures were applied, which weakens the
validity of the results or simply turns them not meaningful [31]. Thus, we recommend using
the dynamic networks and their corresponding measures as provided by Kim et al. [31]
and by Holme et al. [26]. We strongly think that utilizing temporal networks as a model to
understand the dynamics of collaboration and its effect would give more actionable insights.
2. Weighted networks: The collaboration between developers and the communication between
them can hardly be imagined without considering the intensity (or frequency) of this collab-
oration or communication, which is a rich information that should be utilized. The work by
Opsahl [43] and by Newman [41] provide methods for bipartite and weighted networks and
their corresponding centrality measures.
3. Community detection: The PSs that handle community detection were based on the work
of Newman [39]. A recent work by Ahn et al. [4] showed promising results for finding
16

structural properties in networks based on the link communities. This method could provide
more robust team organizations with the collaborative development.
4. Link prediction and assessment: The prediction of collaboration or communication between
developers was, surprisngly, not found in the PSs. In network science there is a plethora of
work in link prediction started by Liben-Nowell and Kleinberg [35]. The link prediction is an
active area in network science and can be utilized in mining software repositories, especially
when incorporating external information [1,2,3]. An application of the link prediction in
this context could be built as recommendation system for bringing developers to projects in
open source.
5.6 Closing thoughts
– The collaboration networks: in the PSs were projected from different interactions. They
were proxy networks from the one mode projection. In most cases, we could not retrieve any
information about the procedures done by the researchers in order to get the OMP.
– The communication networks: they were in some cases projected from bipartite network
of thread-developer network, where a thread was a message that was sent to all developers
and any one could reply it. This results in a very dense network that was not really a
communication network.
– Dynamic vs Static: Should be considered carefully. While static networks give some insights
regarding the modeled network, a dynamic analysis of a network gives richer insights
regarding the process that is being done over this network.
– Bipartite networks: should be utilized as bipartite networks when possible. This requires
extra measures and more models that are context dependent.
– In-applicability of some measures: not every measure can provide meaningful results for
every network. A measure should be first understood well in order to use it and get useful
insights.
5.7 Threats to validity
– Completeness: The completeness of any SLR is hard to attain. We described the steps we
followed to cover as relevant studies as possible.
– Reproducibility: We incorporated the QGS in order to guarantee the reproducibility of the
results in the SLR. All of the data used for this review is available upon request.
6 Conclusion
In this work, we have presented a systematic literature review to identify and evaluate the use of
network science as a tool to understand the collaboration of developers in software engineering.
We followed the most rigor steps we know in performing a systematic review. We identified 35
primary studies, assessed their quality, and extracted the data from them. The data extracted
from the primary studies was used to answer 5 research questions. Our answers showed that the
primary studies used networks that lack the required quality, they used in most cases unsuitable
measures, and in most cases they do not validate the results. We provided some pointers that
can be utilized in future research works in order to do a good network analysis with actionable
insights.
17

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