Temporal Community Detection in Developer Collaboration Networks of Microservice Projects

Analysis of developer collaboration in software projects can provide meaningful insights into the development culture of the team as well as enforce good and prevent bad development practices, such as observing the one service - one team rule for microservice projects. In this paper, we combine two previous works from different domains to perform temporal community detection in two networks of developer collaboration. We perform a case study of an open-source microservice benchmark project. We find several communities and their activity trends across time. The findings show that only one connected group of developers was working on the project at any given time, with several core developers consistently contributing and many developers entering and leaving the project. To our knowledge, it is the first attempt to apply temporal network analysis to developer collaboration networks.