Intern
Machine Learning for Complex Networks

What makes teams successful?

14.01.2022

On January 14th, Prof. Dr. Ingo Scholtes will give a talk in the AI Talks @ JMU series. The talk with the title "What makes teams successful? Insights from Repository Mining, Network Science, and Empirical Software Engineering" addresses the question how we can use massive data on software repositories to gain insights into collaborative software engineering.

The convergence of social and technical systems provides us with a wealth of log data that capture the structure and dynamics of social organizations. It is tempting to utilize these data to better understand how social systems evolve, how collaboration patterns in teams are related to their "success" or "failure", and how the position of individuals in social networks affects their performance, motivation, and productivity.

Focusing on the empirical study of collaborative software projects, this talk shows how massive repository data from publicly available online platforms can be used to better understand human and social aspects in software development. Addressing an ongoing debate about the influence of team size on developer productivity, it specifically argues how we can use high-resolution time-stamped data on code editing to automatically construct meaningful collaboration networks. It further shows how we can creatively use network models to test hypotheses at the intersection of software engineering, organizational theory, and network science, and which pitfalls await us in the analysis of massive data from online systems.

Details on the talk are available online.