Analysis of the Social Community Based on the Network Growing Model in Open Source Software Community

TL;DR

This paper models the growth of open source software communities, incorporating altruism behavior into a simulation to analyze how developer interactions influence project development efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces altruism behavior into a network growth model for open source communities, enhancing understanding of collaborative dynamics.

Findings

Altruism improves project development efficiency in the simulation.

Network growth patterns are influenced by developer behavior.

Simulation results highlight key factors affecting community expansion.

Abstract

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.