Validates continuity-assurance checks by empirically proving that single-maintainer burnout and commit staleness are direct precursors to project failure.
A study of 104 deprecated open-source projects on GitHub identified nine primary reasons for project failure. The top reasons were being usurped by a competitor (27 projects), becoming obsolete (20 projects), lack of time from the main contributor (18 projects), lack of interest from the main contributor (18 projects), and reliance on outdated technologies (14 projects). The research found that failed projects closely resembled low-popularity projects in their lack of continuous integration and missing contributing guidelines. Additionally, the study noted that a lack of commits over a one-year period was an 86% accurate indicator that a project had been formally or informally abandoned.
The study found that of 542 popular GitHub projects with no commits in the last year, 86% of the surveyed developers confirmed the project was indeed abandoned.
relying on dead projects that will not receive bug fixes or compatibility updates
a complete lack of commits over a one-year period is an empirically validated indicator of project abandonment.
36 of the 104 analyzed project failures were directly caused by the lack of time or lack of interest of the main contributor.
project failure due to the sudden departure or burnout of a key maintainer
projects dependent on a single core developer lack the redundancy necessary to survive when that individual inevitably loses interest or availability.
Some maintenance practices—specifically the adoption of contributing guidelines and continuous integration—have an important association with a project failure or success.
Risk Guard does not evaluate whether a repository implements automated continuous integration or provides contributing guidelines.
Risk Guard would be better if it evaluated the presence of continuous integration services and standardized contributing documentation as signals of project resilience.