A Tool for the Analysis of Social Networks in Collaborative Software Development

In this article, we present a tool that is designed to investigate the collaboration network between actors in software development groups. Our approach uses data derived from the version control system SVN (subversion) to retrieve the collaboration structures using an elaborate refinement process. The software 'SVN Network Analysis Tool' (SVNNAT) aims to reveal the strengths and properties of collaboration ties between the developers in order to analyze their productivity and their quality of work in a given constellation of a software development network. In contrast to an earlier version of SVNNAT, our current approach accounts for the specific structures of programming languages in software code to separate technical artifacts from the information about the actors' collaboration in the development network. The result of the evaluation process is a social network of software developers that can be analyzed using typical indicators of topology properties like betweenness, closeness, and degree centralization. In a further step such network analysis can be used to propose an efficient network structure for developers of newly designed software projects.