ABSTRACT
Studies of software systems based on complex networks theory nowadays are mainly focusing on dependency of software modules and packages. Christopher Zachor (2013) examined the structure, function, and evolvability of software collaboration networks. All of them reveal scale-free and/or heavy-tailed degree distributions, which implies software systems represent another important field which complex networks theory can contribute to the quantifiable measures. One disadvantage of Christopher’s work is that only a few hundred software packages are analyzed. Xiaolong Zheng et al.(2008) modeled the whole package network of a Linux distribution Gentoo. They developed two new network growth models which take into consideration
1 INTRODUCTION
In recent years, the dramatic growth to identify and classify network has been witnessed in a wide variety of fields. Rather different from those found in regular networks or simple random networks, it has been discovered that the underlying structures of these networks-including scientific collaboration networks (Wang, 2013), movie actor collaboration in sociology, and Power Grids (Pagani, 2013) and engineering informatics (Zhao, 2008) in engineering-share many scale-free and smallworld qualities. The small-world characteristic of complex networks reflects “six degrees of separation” phenomenon in a real social network, while its scale-free feature bears the Matthew effect in the field of economy.
