Three Metrics to Explore the Openness of GitHub projects
This addresses the challenge of attracting and retaining developers in open-source projects, though it is incremental as it adapts existing metrics.
The paper tackled the problem of measuring how easy it is for new users to contribute to open-source software projects by proposing three metrics focused on community distribution, acceptance rate of external contributions, and time to become a collaborator, and applied them to GitHub projects to provide practical findings.
Open source software projects evolve thanks to a group of volunteers that help in their development. Thus, the success of these projects depends on their ability to attract (and keep) developers. We believe the openness of a project, i.e., how easy is for a new user to actively contribute to it, can help to make a project more attractive. To explore the openness of a software project, we propose three metrics focused on: (1) the distribution of the project community, (2) the rate of acceptance of external contributions and (3) the time it takes to become an official collaborator of the project. We have adapted and applied these metrics to a subset of GitHub projects, thus giving some practical findings on their openness.