Is this GitHub project maintained? Measuring the level of maintenance activity of open-source projects

GitHub hosts an impressive number of high-quality OSS projects. However, selecting “the right tool for the job” is a challenging task, because we do not have precise information about those high-quality projects. In this paper, we propose a data-driven approach to measure the level of maintenance ac...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inInformation and software technology Vol. 122; p. 106274
Main Authors Coelho, Jailton, Valente, Marco Tulio, Milen, Luciano, Silva, Luciana L.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Elsevier B.V 01.06.2020
Subjects
GitHub
Open source software
Unmaintained projects
GitHub
Unmaintained projects
Open source software
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Summary:GitHub hosts an impressive number of high-quality OSS projects. However, selecting “the right tool for the job” is a challenging task, because we do not have precise information about those high-quality projects. In this paper, we propose a data-driven approach to measure the level of maintenance activity of GitHub projects. Our goal is to alert users about the risks of using unmaintained projects and possibly motivate other developers to assume the maintenance of such projects. We train machine learning models to define a metric to express the level of maintenance activity of GitHub projects. Next, we analyze the historical evolution of 2927 active projects in the time frame of one year. From 2927 active projects, 16% become unmaintained in the interval of one year. We also found that Objective-C projects tend to have lower maintenance activity than projects implemented in other languages. Finally, software tools—such as compilers and editors—have the highest maintenance activity over time. A metric about the level of maintenance activity of GitHub projects can help developers to select open source projects.
ISSN:0950-5849
1873-6025
DOI:10.1016/j.infsof.2020.106274