Measuring correlation between commit frequency and popularity on GitHub

Sammanfattning: This thesis studies the correlation between the commit frequency and popularity of Github projects. Over 12 000 projects were retrieved using the Github API, resulting in a dataset containing 85 projects after filtering out projects that were deemed unfit. The analysis of the projects consisted of calculating the Pearson Correlation Coefficient using the frequency of commits and popularity as variables. Different time intervals were studied along with several metrics of popularity based upon the project’s metadata retrieved from Github. The results varied for the different time intervals and metrics of popularity but none of the measurements resulted in a correlation coefficient which indicated a strong or moderate correlation. Therefore this study reached the conclusion of no existing correlation between commit frequency and popularity. Although no correlation was found, several potential measures of improvement for further research were discovered.