On the Popularity of GitHub Applications: A Preliminary Note
Abstract
GitHub is the world's largest collection of open source software. Therefore, it is important both to software developers and users to compare and track the popularity of GitHub repositories. In this paper, we propose a framework to assess the popularity of GitHub software, using their number of stars. We also propose a set of popularity growth patterns, which describe the evolution of the number of stars of a system over time. We show that stars tend to correlate with other measures, like forks, and with the effective usage of GitHub software by third-party programs. Throughout the paper we illustrate the application of our framework using real data extracted from GitHub.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1507.00604,
title = {On the Popularity of GitHub Applications: A Preliminary Note},
author = {Hudson Borges and Marco Tulio Valente and Andre Hora and Jailton Coelho},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.00604},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
An extended and revised version of this paper appeared at ICSME 2017: Hudson Borges, Andre Hora, Marco Tulio Valente. Understanding the Factors that Impact the Popularity of GitHub Repositories. In 32nd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), pages 334-344, 2016. https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04984