  The goal of this study is to identify, review, and analyze the published
research works that used network analysis as a tool for understanding the human
collaboration on different levels of software development. This study and its
findings are expected to be of benefit for software engineering practitioners
and researchers who are mining software repositories using tools from network
science field. We conducted a systematic literature review, in which we
analyzed a number of selected papers from different digital libraries based on
inclusion and exclusion criteria. We identified $35$ primary studies (PSs) from
4 digital libraries, then we extracted data from each PS according to a
predefined data extraction sheet. The results of our data analysis showed that
not all of the constructed networks used in the PSs were valid as the edges of
these networks did not reflect a real relationship between the entities of the
network. Additionally, the used measures in the PSs were in many cases not
suitable for the used networks. Also, the reported analysis results by the PSs
were not, in most cases, validated using any statistical model. Finally, many
of the PSs did not provide lessons or guidelines for software practitioners
that can improve the software engineering practices. Although employing network
analysis in mining developers' collaboration showed some satisfactory results
in some of the PSs, the application of network analysis needs to be conducted
more carefully. That is said, the constructed network should be representative
and meaningful, the used measure needs to be suitable for the context, and the
validation of the results should be considered. More and above, we state some
research gaps, in which network science can be applied, with some pointers to
recent advances that can be used to mine collaboration networks.
