A Prediction Model of the Project Life-span in Open Source Software Ecosystem
This work addresses the problem of managing development cycles for developers, investors, and contributors in open source software ecosystems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing statistical analysis methods.
The paper tackles predicting the lifespan of open source software projects by analyzing GitHub project characteristics, finding that programming languages, file count, label format, and membership expressions impact lifespan, and proposes a prediction model to estimate it.
In nature ecosystems, animal life-spans are determined by genes and some other biological characteristics. Similarly, the software project life-spans are related to some internal or external characteristics. Analyzing the relations between these characteristics and the project life-span, may help developers, investors, and contributors to control the development cycle of the software project. The paper provides an insight on the project life-span for a free open source software ecosystem. The statistical analysis of some project characteristics in GitHub is presented, and we find that the choices of programming languages, the number of files, the label format of the project, and the relevant membership expressions can impact the life-span of a project. Based on these discovered characteristics, we also propose a prediction model to estimate the project life-span in open source software ecosystems. These results may help developers reschedule the project in open source software ecosystem.