Linux

PageRank Analysis

Using simple, established techniques like measuring the amount of contributed code to evaluate developer influence turned out to result in incorrect conclusions. By applying PageRank analysis to developer networks we are able to produce results that more closely reflect the real-world perception of influential developers. The tables shown on the right present the results for Linux version 3.7. The page rank analysis applied to the developer network is able to correctly identify a number of highly influential developers, indicated by their known roles in the community. In contrast, ranking developers according to commit count fails to identify many of the known influential developers. In summary, the rich information embedded in a developer network's structure is able to capture an authentic representation of developer influence that is not captured by more common approaches such as commit count.

Page Rank

Rank	Developer	Tag Count	Role
1	Linus Torvalds	974	Central Maintainer
2	Greg KH	3252	Linux Foundation Fellow
3	Mauro Carvalho Chehab	1624	Tooling Contributor
4	David S. Miller	1210	Networking Core Maintainer
5	Herbert Xu	162	Networking Core Contributor
6	Antti Palosaari	528	Individual Contributor
7	Daniel Vetter	558	Intel DRM Drivers Maintainer
8	Andrew Morton	902	General Coordinator
9	Felipe Balbi	588	Maintainer for various USB aspects
10	Samuel Ortiz	282	IRDA, MFD and NFC co-Maintainer

Commit Count

Rank	Developer	Commit Count
1	Hartley Sweeten	471
2	Antti Palosaari	219
3	Al Viro	179
4	Wei Yongjun	147
5	Sachin Kamat	142
6	Mark Brown	136
7	Eric W. Biederman	130
8	David Howells	126
9	Hans Verkuil	123
10	Daniel Vetter	123

Community Detection

Using our approach, we were able to correctly infer from the network structure, a number of communities that have shared development responsibilities. The communities that are largely responsible for the KVM hypervisor, Ext4 filesystem, S390 mainframe architecture support, and staging device drivers are shown on the right. This result supports the notion that our approach is able to capture real-world collaboration and identify communities of people with shared responsibility.

KVM