Understanding the Factors that Impact the Popularity of GitHub Repositories

TL;DR

This study analyzes factors influencing GitHub repository popularity, revealing key elements like programming language, application domain, and feature updates, and identifies four main growth patterns through clustering star count time series.

Contribution

It identifies main factors affecting GitHub project popularity and uncovers four distinct growth patterns using clustering analysis.

Findings

Programming language and domain impact star counts

New features influence project popularity

Four main growth patterns identified

Abstract

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.