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Evolution of Influential Developer’s Communities in OSS and its Impact on Quality

Beenish Khan1, Muhammad Rafiq Mufti2, Asad Habib3, Humaira Afzal4, Mohammad Abdul Moiz Zia5, Afshan Almas6, Shahid Hussain7,*, Bashir Ahmad1

1 Department of Computer Science, COMSATS University, Islamabad, 45550, Pakistan
2 Department of Computer Science, COMSATS University, Vehari, 61100, Pakistan
3 Department of Computer Science, Kohat University of Science & Technology, Kohat, 26000, Pakistan
4 Department of Computer Science, Bahaddin Zakeria University, Multan, 60800, Pakistan
5 Department of Computer Science, University of Central Punjab, Lahore, 54590, Pakistan
6 Institute of Computer Science & Information Technology, The Women University Multan, 60800, Pakistan
7 Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Oregon, Eugene, 97401, Oregon, USA

* Corresponding Author: Shahid Hussain. Email: email

(This article belongs to this Special Issue: Soft Computing Methods for Innovative Software Practices)

Intelligent Automation & Soft Computing 2021, 28(2), 337-352. https://doi.org/10.32604/iasc.2021.015034

Abstract

The high turnover of developers in the Open-Source Software (OSS) systems is due to the lack of restriction on a developer’s involvement and contributions. The primary developers start and administer an OSS project. However, they do not manage those who contribute. The literature shows that 80% of issues are resolved by 20% of developers when developing an OSS. Therefore, identifying influential developer communities is quite necessary for OSS stakeholders to reduce the efforts required to solve the issue through releases and predict quality. The purpose of this proposed empirical study is to explore influential communities by analyzing the relationship between their members as an OSS evolves and its impact on software quality. We performed several experiments with releases of three widely used OSS, namely “BIGDL,” “INCUBATOR-MXNET” and “RECOMMENDERS.” The major implications of the proposed study include; 1) The community development structure is not centralized and controlled, 2) Influential communities were observed in early releases of an OSS, 3) There is no guarantee of an influential community in the consecutive releases, 4) Notable developers are varied through the releases, and 5) The presence of influential communities in subsequent releases could lead to the maturity of an OSS.

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Cite This Article

B. Khan, M. Rafiq Mufti, A. Habib, H. Afzal, M. Abdul Moiz Zia et al., "Evolution of influential developer’s communities in oss and its impact on quality," Intelligent Automation & Soft Computing, vol. 28, no.2, pp. 337–352, 2021.



cc This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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