@inproceedings{meneely_williams_2011, title={Socio-technical developer networks: Should we trust our measurements?}, DOI={10.1145/1985793.1985832}, abstractNote={Software development teams must be properly structured to provide effectiv collaboration to produce quality software. Over the last several years, social network analysis (SNA) has emerged as a popular method for studying the collaboration and organization of people working in large software development teams. Researchers have been modeling networks of developers based on socio-technical connections found in software development artifacts. Using these developer networks, researchers have proposed several SNA metrics that can predict software quality factors and describe the team structure. But do SNA metrics measure what they purport to measure? The objective of this research is to investigate if SNA metrics represent socio-technical relationships by examining if developer networks can be corroborated with developer perceptions. To measure developer perceptions, we developed an online survey that is personalized to each developer of a development team based on that developer's SNA metrics. Developers answered questions about other members of the team, such as identifying their collaborators and the project experts. A total of 124 developers responded to our survey from three popular open source projects: the Linux kernel, the PHP programming language, and the Wireshark network protocol analyzer. Our results indicate that connections in the developer network are statistically associated with the collaborators whom the developers named. Our results substantiate that SNA metrics represent socio-technical relationships in open source development projects, while also clarifying how the developer network can be interpreted by researchers and practitioners.}, booktitle={2011 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)}, author={Meneely, A. and Williams, L.}, year={2011}, pages={281–290} }
 @inproceedings{meneely_williams_2009, title={Secure open source collaboration: An empirical study of linus' law}, DOI={10.1145/1653662.1653717}, abstractNote={Open source software is often considered to be secure. One factor in this confidence in the security of open source software lies in leveraging large developer communities to find vulnerabilities in the code. Eric Raymond declares Linus' Law "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." Does Linus' Law hold up ad infinitum? Or, can the multitude of developers become "too many cooks in the kitchen", causing the system's security to suffer as a result? In this study, we examine the security of an open source project in the context of developer collaboration. By analyzing version control logs, we quantified notions of Linus' Law as well as the "too many cooks in the kitchen" viewpoint into developer activity metrics. We performed an empirical case study by examining correlations between the known security vulnerabilities in the open source Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 kernel and developer activity metrics. Files developed by otherwise-independent developer groups were more likely to have a vulnerability, supporting Linus' Law. However, files with changes from nine or more developers were 16 times more likely to have a vulnerability than files changed by fewer than nine developers, indicating that many developers changing code may have a detrimental effect on the system's security.}, booktitle={CCS'09: Proceedings of the 16th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security}, author={Meneely, A. and Williams, L.}, year={2009}, pages={453–462} }