Nalanda: A Socio-Technical Graph for Building Software Analytics Tools at Enterprise Scale

Software development is information-dense knowledge work that requires collaboration with other developers and awareness of artifacts such as work items, pull requests, and files. With the speed of development increasing, information overload is a challenge for people developing and maintaining these systems. Finding information and people is difficult for software engineers, especially when they work in large software systems or have just recently joined a project. In this paper, we build a large scale data platform named Nalanda platform, which contains two subsystems: 1. A large scale socio-technical graph system, named Nalanda graph system 2. A large scale recommendation system, named Nalanda index system that aims at satisfying the information needs of software developers. The Nalanda graph is an enterprise scale graph with data from 6,500 repositories, with 37,410,706 nodes and 128,745,590 edges. On top of the Nalanda graph system, we built software analytics applications including a newsfeed named MyNalanda, and based on organic growth alone, it has Daily Active Users (DAU) of 290 and Monthly Active Users (MAU) of 590. A preliminary user study shows that 74% of developers and engineering managers surveyed are favorable toward continued use of the platform for information discovery. The Nalanda index system constitutes two indices: artifact index and expert index. It uses the socio-technical graph (Nalanda graph system) to rank the results and provide better recommendations to software developers. A large scale quantitative evaluation shows that the Nalanda index system provides recommendations with an accuracy of 78% for the top three recommendations.