Understanding the Factors that Impact the Popularity of GitHub Repositories
This provides incremental insights for open-source developers to understand and improve project popularity in a competitive market.
The study analyzed factors influencing the popularity of GitHub repositories, such as programming language and application domain, and identified four patterns of popularity growth based on data from 2,279 repositories.
Software popularity is a valuable information to modern open source developers, who constantly want to know if their systems are attracting new users, if new releases are gaining acceptance, or if they are meeting user's expectations. In this paper, we describe a study on the popularity of software systems hosted at GitHub, which is the world's largest collection of open source software. GitHub provides an explicit way for users to manifest their satisfaction with a hosted repository: the stargazers button. In our study, we reveal the main factors that impact the number of stars of GitHub projects, including programming language and application domain. We also study the impact of new features on project popularity. Finally, we identify four main patterns of popularity growth, which are derived after clustering the time series representing the number of stars of 2,279 popular GitHub repositories. We hope our results provide valuable insights to developers and maintainers, which can help them on building and evolving systems in a competitive software market.