¹School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Hubei University, 430062, Wuhan, China.
²Hubei Province Eng. Technology Research Center for Education Info., Hubei University, 430062, Wuhan, China.

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Abstract—Understanding developers’ collaborative behavior is an essential step to facilitate the needs of collaborative development activities in open-source software (OSS) ecosystem. In this paper, we conducted an empirical study to gain insight into how existing developers collaborate together and what factors affect their collaborative behavior from the perspectives of collective interaction, and attempt to explore the typical interactive modes for the corresponding types of new collaborations. The results show that different existing developers tend to prefer different collaboration patterns, and short topological distance has very limited effect on their first collaboration. By contrast, development experience seems to be important factor that affect their potential collaboration. The results also indicate that different collaboration patterns support different interactive modes, and are related to the popularity of projects. The findings are of value for existing developers to maintain sufficient collaboration awareness, so as to improve the stability and sustainability of OSS ecosystem.

Index Terms—OSS ecosystem, developer collaboration network, behavior analysis, collaboration pattern.

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Cite: Yaxin Liu1, Peng He, Gaoyan Wu, Yilu Li, "Towards Understanding Developers’ Collaborative Behavior in Open Source Software Ecosystems," Journal of Software vol. 12, no. 6, pp. 393-405, 2017.