How Developers' Collaborations Identified from Different Sources Tell Us about Code Changes

Written communications recorded through channels such as mailing lists or issue trackers, but also code co-changes, have been used to identify emerging collaborations in software projects. Also, such data has been used to identify the relation between developers' roles in communication networks and source code changes, or to identify mentors aiding newcomers to evolve the software project. However, results of such analyses may be different depending on the communication channel being mined. This paper investigates how collaboration links vary and complement each other when they are identified through data from three different kinds of communication channels, i.e., mailing lists, issue trackers, and IRC chat logs. Also, the study investigates how such links overlap with links mined from code changes, and how the use of different sources would influence (i) the identification of project mentors, and (ii) the presence of a correlation between the social role of a developer and her changes. Results of a study conducted on seven open source projects indicate that the overlap of communication links between the various sources is relatively low, and that the application of networks obtained from different sources may lead to different results.