GitHub Projects. Quality Analysis of Open-Source Software.

Nowadays Open-Source Software is developed mostly by decentralized teams of developers cooperating on-line. GitHub portal is an online social network that supports development of software by virtual teams of programmers. Since there is no central mechanism that governs the process of team formation, it is interesting to investigate if there are any significant correlations between project quality and the characteristics of the team members. However, for such analysis to be possible, we need good metrics of a project quality. This paper develops two such metrics, first one reflecting project's popularity, and the second one - the quality of support offered by team members to users. The first metric is based on the number of 'stars' a project is given by other GitHub members, the second is obtained using survival analysis techniques applied to issues reported on the project by its users. After developing the metrics we have gathered characteristics of several GitHub projects and analyzed their influence on the project quality using statistical regression techniques.