A Study of the Relationships between Source Code Metrics and Attractiveness in Free Software Projects

A significant number of Free Software projects has been widely used and considered successful. However, there is an even larger number of them that cannot overcome the initial step towards building an active community of users and developers. In this study, we investigated whether there are relationships between source code metrics and attractiveness, i.e., the ability of a project to attract users and developers. To verify these relationships, we analyzed 6,773 Free Software projects from the SourceForge.net repository. The results indicated that attractiveness is indeed correlated to some source code metrics. This suggests that measurable attributes of the project source code somehow affect the decision to contribute and adopt a Free Software project. The findings described in this study show that it is relevant for project leaders to monitor source code quality, most specifically a few objective metrics, since these can have a positive influence in their chances of forming a community of contributors and users around the software, enabling further enhancement in its quality.