An Agent Based Simulation System for Open Source Software Development

In recent years, the organization of open source software development has evolved rapidly. Analyzing the behaviors of contributors helps us understand the development process of open source software and explore the general and special rules of it. Agent based model is a type of computing model that can simulate the behaviors and interactions between autonomous entities. With agent based models, we can simulate the self-organization process of open source software development by simulating contributors' behaviors. Therefore, we design an agent-based simulation system for open source software development, which are implemented with the Java Agent Development framework. In experiments, we obtain the simulation results by inputting historical behavior information of open source repositories on GitHub. Then we compare the results of various models. Finally, by adjusting input parameters for issue resolution process, we analyze the impact of these parameters, which shows this system also helps understand how to control the open source software development process.