Network analysis of OSS evolution
Wen Zhang, Ye Yang, Qing Wang · 2011
While complexity is an essential problem inherent in software system and its development, OSS (Open-Source Software) is not an exception and is not immune to this problem as well. The fast growth of OSS movement has impressed us with reduced cost but high quality software. To learn some lessons from successful OSS in handling the complexity, social network analysis is prevalent in analyzing both human-aspect and source-code-aspect interaction of OSS. This paper conducted an empirical study of an OSS project-ArgoUML. Unlike most previous studies regarding OSS email archives as a whole social network, our focus is on the quantitative analysis of a series of social networks produced in the process of OSS version evolution and module development.