A case study of NPM repositories

Nowadays, the increasing need of software products in the market is changing the way of developing software, where Open Source has become one of the main actors. With the growth of Open Source projects and the appearance of a plethora of collaboration platforms, researchers have seen an opportunity in mining these projects to study their development practices. Known as Open Source analysis, this field aims to identify the key success of Open Source projects. Even though there are several factors that may affect the success, most of the analysis made are focused on the source code, such as security vulnerabilities, the programming language, software licensing, or on methodological aspects such as refactoring or testing. A key factor that has a crucial role in the success of a project, and is not often analyzed, is the social dimension. Another analysis feature which is generally neglected is the temporal dimension when analyzing the social aspects of Open Source projects. The objective of this thesis is to analyze the social interactions within a project's community having special consideration to time constraints. We use mining software repositories techniques to extract data from a reduced set of 100 NPM repositories to detect social patterns and behaviours that may reveal a healthy and reliable community and therefore developing successful Open Source projects. Contrary to what often have been assumed, having a reduced core of code contributors does not affect the evolution of their communities. Having an active and participative project community is not related to the activity of its contributors. Furthermore, thanks to analyzing the temporal dimension, we detected cases of project abandonement, or on the contrary the rise and success of a repository. Finally, discussing the obtained results, the ongoing and future steps are outlined