软件数字社会学

With the continuous development of the internet, software development (especially global open-source development) is facing critical challenges, such as individual differences in developers distributed worldwide, the increasing difficulty of group collaboration, and the complex ecosystems formed by extensive social participation. These problems exhibit strong sociological characteristics in regard to the activity of software development. This study proposes the concept of software digital sociology that involves mining abundant software-activity data to investigate individual learning, group collaboration, and sustainable ecosystems. We discuss the primary investigation of the critical issues associated with the open-source supply chain and suggest that software digital sociology can inspire software-development researchers to understand the key challenges posed by extensive (computer-mediated) social participation to promote exploration of solutions using a different paradigm.