How to evaluate the productivity of software ecosystem: a case study in GitHub

With the development of open source community, the software ecosystem has become a popular perspective in the research on software development process and environment. Software productivity is an important evaluation indicator of the software ecosystem health. A successful software ecosystem relies on long-term and stable production activities by the users, which ensures that the software ecosystem can continuously provide the value needed by users. Therefore, the measurement of software ecosystem productivity can help maintain the user development efficiency and the stability of the software ecosystem. However, there is still little literature on the productivity of open source software ecosystems. By analogy with the natural ecosystem, this paper gives the relevant definitions of software ecosystem productivity and analyzes the factors affecting the productivity of software ecosystem. Based on the factors of the ecosystem productivity and their interrelationships, this paper establishes a software ecosystem productivity model and takes the GitHub platform as an example for detailed analysis and explanation. The results show that the model can better explain the factors affecting the productivity of software ecosystems. It is helpful for the research on the measurement of the software ecosystem health and the software development efficiency.