Analyzing Social Behavior of Software Developers Across Different Communication Channels

Abstract

Software developers use different project repositories (i.e., mailing list, bug tracking repositories, discussion forums etc.) to interact with each other or to solve software related problems. The growing interest in the usage of social media channels (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) have also attracted the open source software community and software developers to adopt an identity in order to disseminate project-related information to a wider audience. Much research has been carried out to analyze the social aspects of software developers in different project repositories but so far no one has tried to study the social communication patterns of developers in other social media channels. We in this paper presents a new dimension to the social aspects of software developers and study if the social communication patterns of software developers is different on project repositories and social media channels (i.e., Twitter).