Journal
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CYBERNETICS
Volume 46, Issue 8, Pages 1784-1795Publisher
IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC
DOI: 10.1109/TCYB.2015.2420316
Keywords
Cybernetic application; group size; productivity; social information foraging theory; task assignment
Categories
Funding
- U.S. National Science Foundation [CCF-1350487]
- Direct For Computer & Info Scie & Enginr
- Division of Computing and Communication Foundations [1350487] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Group size is a key factor in collaborative software development and many other cybernetic applications where task assignments are important. While methods exist to estimate its value for proprietary projects, little is known about how group size affects distributed and decentralized cybernetic applications and in particular open source software (OSS) development. This paper presents a novel approach in which we frame developers' collective resolution of OSS change tasks as a social information foraging problem. This new perspective enables us to predict the optimal group size and quantify group size's effect on individual performance. We test the theory with data mined from two projects: 1) Firefox and 2) Mylyn. This paper not only uncovers the mismatch of optimal and actual group sizes, but also reveals the association of optimality with improved productivity. In addition, the social-level productivity gain is observed as project evolves. We show this paper's impact by extending the frontiers of knowledge in two areas: 1) social coding and 2) recommendation systems.
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