Communities and dynamical processes in a complex software network

Complex technological networks represent a growing challenge to support and maintain as their number of elements become higher and their interdependencies more involved. On the other hand, for networks that grow in a decentralized manner, it is possible to observe certain patterns in their overall structure that may be taken into account for a more tractable analysis. An example of such a pattern is the spontaneous formation of communities or modules. An important question regarding the detection of communities is if these are really representative of any internal network feature. In this work, we explore the community structure of a real complex software network, and correlate this modularity information with the internal dynamical processes that the network is designed to support. Our results show that the dependence between community structure and internal dynamical processes is remarkable, supporting the fact that a community division of this complex network is helpful in the assessment of the underlying dynamical structure, and thus is a useful tool to achieve a simpler representation of the complexity of the network.