A broad approach to expert detection using syntactic and semantic social networks analysis in the context of Global Software Development

Social network analysis has been widely used in different application contexts. For example, in Global Software Development, where multiple developers with diverse skills and knowledge are involved, the use of social networking models helps to understand how these developers collaborate. Finding experts who can help address critical elements or issues in a project is a challenging and critical task. It is especially true in the context of Global Software Development projects, where developers with specific skills and knowledge often need to be identified. In this sense, searching for essential members is a valuable task, as they are fundamental to the evolution of the network. This article proposes a broad solution for syntactic and semantic analysis in social networks in the Global Software Development context. In this solution, we define a model for the social network capable of capturing collaboration between developers, incorporate strategies for temporal analysis of the network, explore the network using machine learning algorithms, and propose an ontology to enrich the data semantically. We conducted three case studies using data extracted from GitHub to evaluate the proposed approach. The case studies provide evidence that our proposed method can identify specialists, highlighting their expertise and importance to the evolution of the social network. •Temporal characterization approach to explore social networks and how their structure evolves.•Diversity-based analysis to address work overload in software development.•Semantic model definition using an ontology to explore implicit aspects of social networks.•Recommendation system combining syntactic and semantic analysis to identify experts in Global Software Development.