Analysis of the Social Community Based on the Network Growing Model in Open Source Software Community
This work addresses the optimization of team dynamics in open source software communities, but it is incremental as it builds on a prior simulation model with a specific behavioral addition.
The authors tackled the problem of modeling the growth of open source software communities by introducing altruism behavior from the Army Ant model into a simulation of developer networks, finding that this addition improved the efficiency of the software development process.
The social community in open source software developers has a complex network structure. The network structure represents the relations between the project and the engineer in the software developer's community. A project forms some teams which consist of engineers categorized into some task group. Source Forge is well known to be one of open source websites. The node and arc in the network structure means the engineer and their connection among engineers in the Source Forge. In the previous study, we found the growing process of project becomes strong according to the number of developers joining into the project. In the growing phase, we found some characteristic patterns between the number of agents and the produced projects. By such observations, we developed a simulation model of performing the growing process of project. In this paper, we introduced the altruism behavior as shown in the Army Ant model into the software developer's simulation model. The efficiency of the software developing process was investigated by some experimental simulation results.