Comprehensive assessment of open source software ecosystem health

Abstract

Recent surveys expose that the use of Open Source Software (OSS) is increasingly becoming a need for organizations in their development projects. However, deciding a proper OSS to be adopted or to contribute to its development is a complex and error-prone task. Analyzing the OSS ecosystem (OSSECO) health may help providing information about: (1) the OSS itself (number of commits, days after the last release, etc.); and (2) their main actors (number of contributors, partners, etc.). There exist proposals that go further and provide aggregated high-level indicators (e.g. visibility as an aggregation of number of community events, number of partners, and other metrics). Nevertheless, there is a lack of useful OSSECO analysis tools to ease the decision making on which OSSECO has the health required by a potential OSS adopter or contributor. In this work, we provide OSS-CARE (OSSeCo heAlthy monitoR and analysEr), an OSS-independent, fully automatic, and real-time framework to assess OSSECO’s health. OSS-CARE supports defining the ecosystem health objectives of potential OSS adopters, OSS contributors, and even OSS managers to inspect their provided health. These objectives are defined based on a well-established model characterizing health metrics that can be potentially aggregated by using a Bayesian network technique. Moreover, the integrated monitoring and analysis components perform an automated assessment of OSSECO’s health by checking the fulfillment of the required health objectives. Furthermore, the result is shown in an appealing dashboard that may ease the complex decision making of which OSS to choose.