A Method for Project Member Role Assignment in Open Source Software Development Using Self-Organizing Maps

Abstract

We propose the development of open source software (OSS) by a web community. At present, SourceForge.net (http://sourceforge.net/) is a typical community for OSS development, consisting of CVS/SVN repositories, mailing lists, bug tracking systems, task management systems, BBS, open discussion forums, and so on. Although many people are involved in the open discussion forums of SourceForge.net, a project leader is required to expedite and manage the process, which is a great responsibility. Membership is also restricted to expert software developers. In the method proposed in this paper, we envisage not only expert users being able to participate, but also those that use the software but do not have programming skills. Moreover, when the development groups are organized, a supervisor is no longer necessary. The community is managed automatically through the aggregation and distribution of the participating members. The basic concept is exactly the model used by existing SNSs and Wikis, and the development process is based on the spiral model. This paper aims to construct a Web2.0 environment that supports such development and enables the proposal of topics by users. Our method allows the selection of suitable project members from a human resource database (DB) using a self-organizing map (SOM), that is, reinforcement learning. In other words, we propose a web community based on the wisdom of crowds, which is distributed and aggregated. To achieve this, we propose the use of a SOM. Section 2 explains the SOM and the concept of the wisdom of the crowd. The proposed system is described in Section 3. Experiments on feature analysis of the members using a SOM are presented in Section 4, with the results and a discussion thereof given in Section 5 and our conclusions in Section 6.