Mining Software Repositories for Social Norms

Social norms facilitate coordination and cooperation
among individuals, thus enable smoother functioning of social
groups such as the highly distributed and diverse open source
software development (OSSD) communities. In these communities,
norms are mostly implicit and hidden in huge records
of human-interaction information such as emails, discussions
threads, bug reports, commit messages and even source code. This
paper aims to introduce a new line of research on extracting social
norms from the rich data available in software repositories. Initial
results include a study of coding convention violations in JEdit,
ArgoUML and Glassfish projects. It also presents a new lifecycle
model for norms in OSSD communities and demonstrates
how a number of norms extracted from the Python development
community follow this life-cycle model.