On the Effectiveness of Emergent Task Allocation of Virtual Programmer Teams

Virtual teams of programmers are a popular form of collaboration both in Open Source, and commercial software projects. In OSS (Open Source Software) projects, programmers make their own decision which project to join, and, therefore, the process of task allocation among the project members is emergent. In this paper, we attempt to simulate such a process based on available data from Git Hub. The simulation is used to test a hypothesis regarding the efficiency of emergent task allocation. In general, we find performance of coordinated methods to be better than emergent algorithms, which leads us to conclusion that controlling team membership through invitations and work assignment is a promising direction.