Abstract:

As a coarse-grained service in open-source environment, software supports user experience and secondary development, and its activity reflects the development state of the software service. Understanding the factors of the activity of software service is an essential step to improve the quality of community software service. We take the Sourceforge open-source community as the research object and use volume of download, pages and click-through to measure the activity of software service from the perspective of social-technical attributes. Our results show that: (1) to get better software activity, the number of core developers should be moderate (around 17), and in order to ensure the actual contribution of developers, the number of participants of the software service should be within 7. In addition, the roles of developers should be as more as possible and their distribution should be as uniform as possible. (2) The more mature software service is, the more active it tends to be. The effect of other technical attributes is not obvious and is irrelevant to their popularity. However, the activity of software service has a significant linear correlation with the variety of technical attributes.

Key words: open-source community, social attribute, technical attribute, software service network, service activity