Exploring the emergence of social networks in collaborative software development through work item tagging

Developing software in collaborative environment needs certain mechanisms and formal communication processes to be successful. Generally work items are used in such environment for coordinating tasks being done by development team. Tagging was explored by Treude and Storey to share matters of concern among team members. Their study proved that tagging is effective in collaborative software development. This paper designs and implements a prototype web application that facilitates work item Owners, work item authors and Tag authors to have collaborative communication that include findings tasks, tagging, and formal information exchange. Moreover this paper explored the emergence of social networking in collaborative software development environment. It finds the emergence of social networks in software development among the collaborative team members. The empirical results revealed that the proposed application could provide better tool support for collaborative software development.