Latent social structure in open source projects

Commercial software project managers design project organizational structure carefully, mindful of available skills, division of labour, geographical boundaries, etc. These organizational "cathedrals" are to be contrasted with the "bazaarlike" nature of Open Source Software (OSS) Projects, which have no pre-designed organizational structure. Any structure that exists is dynamic, self-organizing, latent, and usually not explicitly stated. Still, in large, complex, successful, OSS projects, we do expect that subcommunities will form spontaneously within the developer teams. Studying these subcommunities, and their behavior can shed light on how successful OSS projects self-organize. This phenomenon could well hold important lessons for how commercial software teams might be organized. Building on known well-established techniques for detecting community structure in complex networks, we extract and study latent subcommunities from the email social network of several ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: SIGSOFT
• Authors: Christian Bird, David S. Pattison, Raissa M. D'Souza, Vladimir Filkov, Premkumar T. Devanbu
• Keywords: Open Source Software, Pre-designed Organizational Structure, SIGSOFT 2008, Software Engineering, Successful Oss Projects