Social Computing in Open Source Community:A Study of Software Reuse

摘要

Software projects are not developed in isolation but often build upon other open source resources. These projects form a kind of reference ecosystem regarded as a software world. Most of social computing works focus on social networks such as Facebook and weibo to mine information. However, few previous works analyze Open Source Community which could help developers conduct collaborative development. In this paper, we model the Java reference ecosystem as a network based on the reuse relationships of GitHub-hosted Java projects and analyze the characteristics and the patterns of this reference ecosystem by using community detection and pattern discovery algorithms. Our study indicates that (1) Developers prefer to reuse software limited in only a small part of projects with cross cutting functionality or advanced applications. (2) Developers usually select software reused with similar function widely depending on different requirements, resulting to different patterns. Based on these collective intelligence, our study opens up several possible future directions of reuse recommendation,which are considered as guidance of collaborative development.