Research On Developer Collaboration Model Of Open Source Software Community

With the development of computer technology,especially the rise of Internet technology and related enterprises,open source software(OSS)develops vigorously.OSS based on global wisdom has become the dominant mode of software technology innovation,and many enterprises have formed unique business models by using OSS.In essence,OSS is a complex adaptive system,and the interaction mechanism of the members in the system affects the discovery and solution of complex problems in the development process,so the collaboration relationship among developers in the OSS community has become the focus of research.The existing research mainly focuses on the analysis of the structural characteristics at the macro level,and the research on the formation process and the dynamic mechanism behind the common collaboration mode are not sufficient.Therefore,it is of great significance to study the deep mechanism of OSS collaboration mode.This study analyzes the collaboration network of OSS community developers in different fields,and the specific research content is divided into the following three parts.(1)Firstly,this part analyzes the static structure of the developer collaboration network in the OSS community,and the role of developers in the community.This part obtains the developer's code submission record through Git,to build the developer collaboration network.By analyzing the structure of the collaboration network,it is found that the collaboration network of OSS community developers has a significant power-law distribution characteristic,and presents a "core-periphery" hierarchical structure.However,the developers in the community spontaneously form a division of roles,in which the core developers play a leading role,the general developers are the backbone of the community,and the peripheral developers complete some relatively simple tasks in the form of "Drive-By-Commits " submission.(2)Secondly,the formation of a cooperative network is the overall result of the spontaneous coordination of interactive objects among individuals in the community.In other words,Collaborative networks did not emerge out of the void,but experienced a process from nothing.Therefore,this part adds the temporal characteristics based on(1),and further analyzes the evolution characteristics of the OSS community over time.It is found that with the development of the community,a giant component appears,which is much larger than the other connected subgraphs.And the topology of the cooperative network evolves from the initial "cluster" state to the "chain" structure,and finally to the "multi-module small-world network".Besides,the collaboration network realizes the scale expansion through the emergence of new modules and the development and merger of existing modules,as well as the maintenance of the interconnection state of multiple modules,and the evolution process of the largest connected subgraph is intrinsically related to the subproject.(3)Based on(1)and(2),we have been able to roughly understand the evolution pattern of the OSS developer collaboration network and the interaction characteristics of people.However,we need to further consider which microscopic interaction mechanisms promote the evolution of this network structure,and explore the mechanism behind the network from a deeper level.Through the analysis of the previous two parts,we find that the formation of developer collaboration relationships is characterized by both structure and attributes.This section first of modules from the two aspects of the characteristics of internal and external collaboration further testing,it is concluded that in the developer collaboration network,the homophily and the propensity to connect is the key factor for the formation of the inner-modular links,and the heterophily of the high degree nodes is the key to the formation of the inter-modular links.According to this property,a dynamic model of collaborative network evolution under the increasing network size is constructed.Besides,the research results of the structure and evolution process of the real collaboration network in(1)and(2)are qualitatively compared with the research in this part,to verify the effectiveness of the model proposed in this study.Finally,after fully understanding the collaboration mode of developers,this study summarizes the management implications for OSS and open innovation activities.In a word,this study can not only supplement the research on the developer's collaboration model of OSS,but also provide some reference value for further exploring the social open innovation activity mode of large-scale groups.