Tesseract: Interactive Visual Exploration of Socio-Technical Relationships

Software developers have long known that project success requires a robust understanding of both tech-nical and social linkages. However, research has largely considered these independently. Research on networks of technical artifacts focuses on techniques like code analysis or mining project archives. Social network analysis has been used to capture information about relations among people. Yet, each type of infor-mation is often far more useful when combined, as when the “goodness ” of social networks is judged by the patterns of dependencies in the technical artifacts. To bring such information together, we have developed Tesseract, a socio-technical dependency browser that utilizes cross-linked displays to enable exploration of the myriad relationships between artifacts, developers, bugs, and communications. We evaluated Tesseract by (1) demonstrating its feasibility with GNOME project data (2) assessing its usability via informal user evaluations, and (3) verifying its suitability for the open source community via semi-structured interviews