Collaboration Analysis in Global Software Development

In global software development distributed teams are often challenged by global distances, such as cultural diversity and linguistic barriers. This stimulates the search for groups of people that can work together and collaborate in a positive way, even though they are working in a distributed environment. In addition, the demand for high quality software motivates the search for experienced developers who are able to solve complex tasks or to help others with their own tasks. This work aims to detect experts and to identify collaborative groups with experienced members in some topics of software development. To achieve these goals the StackOverflow forum was used and modeled as a complex network. The presented method uses NetSCAN algorithm to detect overlapping communities, expert developers and their topics of expertise in social networks. Through a temporal analysis over the social network multidisciplinary developers were found as well as people who are changing their interests over time. In a first evaluation a statistic test showed that experts (indicated by the proposed method) have a higher performance than common users. A second evaluation showed that these experts are suitable for recommendation systems in question-answer forums.