Ranking open source software based on crowd wisdom

Software reuse is critical in open source based software development, but it is very difficult to find a excellent reusable from large amount of similar candidate software in communities. Currently, lots of research works evaluate software by analyzing artifacts created by software developers, few of them reveals the power of feedbacks generated by software users, which we believe very valuable for software ranking. In this paper, we connect open source software from different communities with user feedbacks in StackOverflow, and explore the correlation between the popularity of posts and time. Finally we rank open source software through using information of connected posts in StackOverflow and compare our ranking result with several influential ranking results like DB-Engines and personal blogs. The comparison results show that our approach can amazingly give similar ranking results to that given by experienced professionals or commercial ranking systems.