The Measurement of the Software Ecosystem's Productivity with GitHub

Software productivity has always been one of the most critical metrics for measuring software development. However, with the open-source community (e.g., GitHub), new software development models are emerging. The traditional productivity metrics do not provide a comprehensive measure of the new software development models. Therefore, it is necessary to build a productivity measurement model of open source software ecosystem suitable for the open-source community's production activities. Based on the natural ecosystem, this paper proposes concepts related to the productivity of open source software ecosystems, analyses influencing factors of open source software ecosystem productivity, and constructs a measurement model using these factors. Model validation experiments show that the model is compatible with a large portion of open source software ecosystems in GitHub. This study can provide references for participants of the open-source software ecosystem to choose proper types of ecosystems. The study also provides a basis for ecosystem health assessment for researchers interested in ecosystem quality.