Research On Stability Of OSS Community Collaboration Network Based On Core Developer Identification

With the advancement of information technology and the promotion of opensource culture,open-source software(OSS)has emerged and flourished.As the main incubation platform for OSS,the completely self-organized development model of the open-source community differs significantly from traditional commercial software development.In the OSS community,developers build collaborative relationships through spontaneous coordination to discover and solve complex problems.Correspondingly,the success of the OSS community has attracted widespread attention from academia.However,existing research mainly focuses on developer participation motivation,OSS community governance,code reuse in the community,etc.,and research on the stability of the community collaborative network that promotes the formation and development of OSS is relatively insufficient.In this thesis,we take two mainstream OSS communities(Vue and Angular)in the field of web development as the research objects,use the code revision relationships between developers to construct the OSS community collaboration network,and analyze its structural evolution.On this basis,we explore the stability of the collaboration network from both static and dynamic perspectives,in order to understand the essence of the success of the open-source community.The main findings are as follows.(1)Based on complex network theory,this work analyzes the static structure and evolutionary process of collaboration networks and finds that the Vue and Angular community collaboration networks exhibit common structural and evolutionary characteristics.Specifically,both collaboration networks have the "core-periphery" structure feature,and consistently present significant modular small-world characteristic throughout the evolutionary process.On this basis,by exploring the correlation between software sub-projects and modular structures,we found that there is a significant correspondence between modular structures and sub-projects.This indicates that the modular structures of the collaborative network have an important impact on the development and iteration of software.(2)For the modular structure of collaborative network,we propose a developer role division method combining modular structure and node degree,and analyze the roles played by different types of developers in maintaining the stability of the static structure of the collaboration network.The results show that there exists a small group of core developers composed of rich nodes and connector nodes in both collaborative networks,and they play a critical role in maintaining the modular small-world structure of the collaborative network.The rich nodes organize non-core nodes to form different modules,and the connector nodes promote the interconnection between different modules through collaborative relationships.(3)Based on the analysis of static structural stability,we combine the evolutionary characteristics of collaborative network to identify the core developers in each version of collaborative network,and explore their role in maintaining the evolutionary stability of the network structure.The results show that there is always a small group of core developers in the evolving collaboration network who maintain the modular small-word state.Furthermore,by analyzing the personnel changes of the core developers during the evolutionary process,we have found that compared with the high mobility of noncore developers,the retention rate of core developers is higher and the personnel composition is more stable.