Developer experience · Longitudinal mining and survival analysis of project activity time series.
An Empirical Study on the Survival Rate of GitHub Projects
Peer-reviewed research · 2022
Summary
Typical projects showed intensive coding-driven active periods followed by decline; survival patterns differed by ecosystem and activity/community factors were useful for understanding survivability.
For your marketing
Possible founder application
Track activity decay and community breadth as leading indicators; design reactivation and maintainer succession plans.
Reported result
What the study found
Typical projects showed intensive coding-driven active periods followed by decline; survival patterns differed by ecosystem and activity/community factors were useful for understanding survivability.
Research question
What the authors investigated
How do GitHub OSS projects evolve, and what activity/community factors relate to survival?
Design
Longitudinal mining and survival analysis of project activity time series.
Sample and setting
GitHub projects created in 2016, observed through October 2021; activity included commits, issues, and pull requests across ecosystems.
Scope and transfer
Limitations to keep in view
The authors caution that projects classified dead may reactivate and that results should not be generalized beyond the studied GitHub cohort; bots/forks are additional validity concerns.
Research sources
Publisher/authoritative landing page and abstract/full text fetched: https://doi.org/10.1145/3524842.3527941 Firecrawl research job 01a14366-d263-71d0-bc44-b95482987b7b returned this citation and metadata.