A Method to Evaluate the Health of OSS Projects Based on the PSR Model and Combination Weighting

Abstract

With the rapid development of open-source software (OSS), an increasing number of enterprises and developers have gradually joined OSS projects. OSS development has become a growing trend. For users, developers, and managers of OSS projects, understanding the health status of a project is conducive to making correct decisions and preventing the risks caused by a decline in the project's health. Therefore, an effective method is needed to evaluate the health of OSS projects. Based on the pressure state response (PSR) model, this paper propose a health evaluation model for OSS projects, defines t he healthof OSS projects from the three levels of pressure, state and response, and selects scientific, reasonable a nd representative indicators. The weight of each index is determined by the combination weighting method, which combines AHP and the entropy method. The health of the project is quantitatively analyzed, and the overall health score of a project is calculated. In addition, to verify the effectiveness of the proposed evaluation model, we conduct an empirical experiment based on real project data on the GitHub open-source platform. The experiment results and analysis show that our evaluation model can effectively reflect the health status of OSS projects.