Understanding Popularity Growth of Packages in JavaScript Package Ecosystem

摘要

In open-source software (OSS) ecosystems, software popularity is valuable information to developers because they continually want to know whether their software is attracting and gaining acceptance. Meanwhile, software popularity is also an important indicator to suggest if a software is beating its competitors in an OSS ecosystem. Accordingly, it is important to understand the popularity growth of packages (i.e., how fast packages become popular). In this paper, we conduct an exploratory study on packages in the node package manager (npm) to understand: (1) the characteristics of popularity growth, and (2) the factors that could affect popularity growth. We propose a method to model popularity growth as a curve and find that popularity growth mathematically follows three models - accelerated growth model (i.e., quadratic model), steady growth model (i.e., linear model), and decelerated growth model (i.e., square root model). The results show that 51.56% of the studied packages depict steady growth model, followed by accelerated growth model and decelerated growth model, 40.02% and 7.20% respectively. Furthermore, we reveal that factors including age, dependents, new features and functionalities have impacts on popularity growth. Our study shows potential tips for helping practitioners on developing and evolving packages in a competitive OSS ecosystem.