Software attributes that impact popularity

Marketing schemes of software products involve different types of approaches based on the nature of the software, the target customers, level of complexity, etc. Open source software products in particular, target largely software developers or users with a significant level of technical experience. This drives our project to evaluate the level of popularity for open software products based on internal software attributes or metrics. We collected a dataset of several open source projects. We used the number of downloads as an indicator of software popularity among its target audience or customers. Using different tools, we collected 65 metrics for each software project. Collected software metrics are related to the software size, design quality and complexity. Results showed consistently, that popularity increases when some metrics such as (McCabe Cyclomatic Complexity) increases. Interestingly such metrics usually appear as significant indicators for software complexity and where their high values impact negatively software quality.