Analysis and Modeling of the Product Structure And
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
ANALYSIS AND MODELING OF THE PRODUCT STRUCTURE AND COMMUNITY STRUCTURE IN OPEN SOURCE PROCESSES By QIZE LE A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering August 2012 To the Faculty of Washington State University: The Members of the Committee appointed to examine the dissertation of QIZE LE find it satisfactory and recommend that it be accepted. ______________________________ Jitesh H. Panchal, Ph.D., Chair _______________________________ Sankar Jayaram, Ph.D. _______________________________ Thomas Rotolo, Ph.D. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENT First of all, I would like to thank my mother and father for all the encouragement and support they have given me to pursue the Ph.D. degree in the United State. Without their continuous financial and emotional support, I could have not achieved any of my goals during the past twenty six years. I want to thank my advisor - Dr. Jitesh H. Panchal for providing me continuous guidance and advice during the past four years. Dr. Panchal helped me to determine my research topic, gave me valuable advice during my studies, and discussed with me about board research issues and research inspirations. Without his instruction, I could have not achieved the thesis and other papers published in journals and conferences. Therefore, I would like to thank him again for giving me an opportunity to work with him and to conduct new and exciting research topics under his advice. I would like to thank my committee members Dr. Sankar Jayaram and Dr. Thomas Rotolo for their advice and comments on this thesis. Their comments helped me to improve my work and broaden my knowledge. I want to thank all of my lab mates - Haoyun Huang, Zhenghui Sha, Yiwen Liu, Bryant Hawthorne, Marc Somers, and Martin Baker. Haoyun Huang and Zhenghui Sha has provided me many valuable comments and thoughts on my research and published paper. Bryant spent a lot of time on discussing with me about research and polishing my English. For all the other lab mates, I would like to thank them as being a big family of Collective Systems Laboratory. Also, I would like to thank all of my friends in China and United States I would like to thank School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering for providing iii me admission and assistantship for my Ph.D. studies. This work presented in the thesis has been supported by NSF CAREER # 0954447. I am grateful for the financial support from NSF, without which this work would not be finished. iv ANALYSIS AND MODELING OF THE PRODUCT STRUCTURE AND COMMUNITY STRUCTURE IN OPEN SOURCE PROCESSES ABSTRACT by QIZE LE, Ph.D. Washington State University August, 2012 Chair: Jitesh H, Panchal Open source product development refers to a paradigm where large numbers of participants collaborate in the form of communities to develop new products and services. The fundamental differences between traditional product development and open source process are that the former is based on top-down decomposition while the latter is based on evolution and self-organization. The paradigm of open source processes has resulted in highly successful products such as Linux and Apache. Despite the success of various projects using open source processes, it is not well understood how the product structures and community structures evolve over time. In response, the main objective in this thesis is to analyze and model product structures and community structures of open source processes over time. The research objective consists of three parts: 1) the characterization of product structures in the open v source processes, 2) the evolutionary characteristics of product structures in the open source processes over time, 3) the co-evolution of product structure and community structures over time. To achieve the first research objective, an agent-based model is proposed to simulate the open source processes. The characterization of product structures on the open source process is analyzed based on a mobile phone example. To achieve the second research objective, an open source software project - Drupal is employed as the case studies. The evolution of product structure is determined by node- level mechanisms. To achieve the third research objective, the co-evolution of product structures and community structures is studied at different levels. The results from this research include new knowledge about the evolution of the product structures and co- evolution of product and community structures over time in open source processes. vi Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENT ................................................................................................................ iii ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... v LIST OF TABLES ......................................................................................................................... ix LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................................... xii 1. CHAPTER ONE - INTRODUCTION TO OPEN SOURCE PROCESSES AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS ............................................................................................................. 1 Section 1.1 - Introduction to Open Source Processes .............................................................................................................................. 2 Section 1.2 - Research Motivation ........................................................................................................................................................... 5 Section 1.3 - Research Questions, Approaches, Tasks, and Contributions .............................................................................................. 8 Section 1.4 - Assumptions in the Open Source Processes ...................................................................................................................... 19 Section 1.5 - Overview of the Dissertation ............................................................................................................................................ 20 2. CHAPTER TWO - BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE REVIEW ................................ 25 Section 2.1 - Existing Studies on Product Structures in Open Source Processes ................................................................................... 27 Section 2.2 - Existing Studies on Community Structures in Open Source Processes ............................................................................. 35 Section 2.3 - Existing Studies on the Network Generation Model ......................................................................................................... 38 Section 2.4 - Existing Studies on Interdependencies between Product Structure and Community Structure ......................................... 41 Section 2.5 - Research Gaps .................................................................................................................................................................. 46 3. CHAPTER THREE - ANALYSIS AND MODELING EFFECT OF PRODUCT STRUCTURE ON OPEN SOURCE PROCESSES ...................................................................... 51 Section 3.1 - Motivation: Answering RQ1 ............................................................................................................................................ 51 Section 3.2 - Background: Agent-based Modeling (ABM) .................................................................................................................... 53 Section 3.3 - Details of the Agent-Based Model of open source processes ............................................................................................ 54 Section 3.4 - Illustrative Example – Development of Mobile Phones using Mass-Collaborative Product Development Processes ....... 63 Section 3.5 - Results from the Execution of the Model for different Mobile Phone architectures ......................................................... 69 Section 3.6 - Discussion and Future Works ........................................................................................................................................... 80 4. CHAPTER FOUR - ANALYSIS AND MODELING PRODUCT STRUCTURE ON OPEN SOURCE PROCESSES ................................................................................................................ 83 Section 4.1 - Motivation: Answering RQ2 ............................................................................................................................................ 83 Section 4.2 - Node-level Mechanisms Associated with Product Evolution............................................................................................ 85 Section 4.3 - Network-Level Analysis of the Evolution of Drupal ........................................................................................................ 92 Section 4.4 - Generative Model for the Evolution of Product Structure ................................................................................................ 99 Section 4.5 - Conclusion and Future Works ........................................................................................................................................ 108 vii 5. CHAPTER FIVE - ANALYSIS OF CO-EVOLUTION BETWEEN PRODUCT STRUCTURE AND COMMUNITY STRUCTURE .................................................................