Software Engineering Commons^™

Understanding Task-Driven Information Flow In Collaborative Networks, Gengxin Miao, Shu Tao, Winnie Cheng, Randy Moulic, Louise E. Moser, David Lo, Xifeng Yan

David LO

Collaborative networks are a special type of social network formed by members who collectively achieve specific goals, such as fixing software bugs and resolving customers’ problems. In such networks, information flow among members is driven by the tasks assigned to the network, and by the expertise of its members to complete those tasks. In this work, we analyze real-life collaborative networks to understand their common characteristics and how information is routed in these networks. Our study shows that collaborative networks exhibit significantly different properties compared with other complex networks. Collaborative networks have truncated power-law node degree distributions and other organizational …