Using formal concept analysis to construct and visualise hierarchies of socio-technical relations

Interest in the human aspects of software engineering has grown in the past years. For example, based on activity logs in software artefact repositories, researchers are recommending who should fix a bug for a certain component. However, existing work largely follows ad-hoc approaches to relate software artefacts to developers and rarely makes those socio-technical relations explicit in a single structure. In this paper we propose a novel application of formal concept analysis, in order to overcome those deficiencies. As a case study, we construct and visualise different views of the developers who fix and discuss bugs in the Eclipse project.