Hi,
There are many platforms that provide hosting services for software developers(e.g. Atlassian's Bitbucket, Github) for free, many open-source projects are hosted on these platforms and the data related to development process of these projects including commit histories, pull logs, number of contributors, etc are all available to the public; Some projects get extremely popular(for instance, a project has received many likes in Github), For example Docker(https://github.com/moby/moby; The original repository has been renamed to Moby), Now I'm asking, What are the features that popular open-source software project artifacts might have in common which makes it probable to predict that a particular project on Github, for instance, is going to be popular?
For instance:
- Does choosing a particular programming language helps?
- Do project need reach a minimum number of contributors? or a certain tipping point?
- Does a popular project always have a small dedicated team of core developers committing 24/7?
Do you know any previous research done on a similar problem?
Thanks,
Hassan
Dear Hassan,
maybe you should explain better what you are interested into. That is, what is the purpose of your investigation, or are you looking for specific characteristics that could affect popularity?
In any case, you may find interesting the following papers:
S. Weber and J. Luo, "What Makes an Open Source Code Popular on Git Hub?," 2014 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshop, Shenzhen, 2014, pp. 851-855.
Borges, Hudson, Andre Hora, and Marco Tulio Valente. "Predicting the popularity of GitHub repositories." Proceedings of the The 12th International Conference on Predictive Models and Data Analytics in Software Engineering. ACM, 2016.
Syed, Dabeeruddin, et al. "Data Analysis of Correlation Between Project Popularity and Code Change Frequency." International Conference on Neural Information Processing. Springer, Cham, 2016.
best regards
Luigi Lavazza
Dear Luigi,
I'm assuming when a project is popular(e.g. has many likes) on Github it is a successful software project(with good quality code, documentations, support, etc) which many people might have found it useful for their work(I think it maybe seem a strong assumption.) Also software takes time to develop, most of the development history is available via software artifacts through a platform like Github, Consequently I'm wondering is it possible to discern some common characteristics for popular(good quality) open-source software projects?(e.g. Does the choice of programming language is an important characteristics of popular projects?, Does code commit history show a pattern of some kind?).
And thank you very much for the resources you mentioned.
Best Regards
Hassan
A classical way of looking at open source software projects is through the lens of socio-technical congruence. Check these papers:
Cataldo, M., Herbsleb, J.D. and Carley, K.M., 2008, October. Socio-technical congruence: a framework for assessing the impact of technical and work dependencies on software development productivity. In Proceedings of the Second ACM-IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering and measurement (pp. 2-11). ACM.
Valetto, G., Helander, M., Ehrlich, K., Chulani, S., Wegman, M. and Williams, C., 2007, May. Using software repositories to investigate socio-technical congruence in development projects. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (p. 25). IEEE Computer Society.
Kwan, I., Schroter, A. and Damian, D., 2011. Does socio-technical congruence have an effect on software build success? a study of coordination in a software project. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 37(3), pp.307-324.
You should start by defining what "popularity" means for you?
After doing that I could tell you if it can be predicted or not.
Dear Jose L. Barros-Justo,
Sorry to answer your question so late, By popularity I mean the attention an open-source project can get from developers in general, For instance on Github.com I think the number of likes that a project gets can be a trivial measure of popularity of that open-source software project; I'm assuming a popular project indicates a successful underlying software development process(One can argue that the utility of the software is more important in it gaining attention than It's quality on Github).
Software development process includes many activities which result in creation of many by-products that are mostly available through a (code) version controlling system like Git, Consequently I'm curious that does a popular open-source software project evolve through predictable steps or phases through its life cycle that could be tracked by mining and analyzing of its artifacts?
A couple questions to get you started:
Small commits can make a big impact, so size doesn't always matter.
Github provides contributor metrics. I'm not sure about fork/clone metrics.
Hope that helps. Cheers!
The actuality (sci.-tech. novelty) and quality of your project are the most high impact factors that will influence the popularity of your project. I think, the GitHub is the most effective tool for projects sharing, updating and forking.
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