Co-evolution of Project Documentation and Popularity Within Github

Github is a very popular collaborative software-development platform that provides typical source-code management and issue tracking features augmented by strong social-networking features such as following developers and watching projects. These features help "spread the word" about individuals and projects, building the reputation of the former and increasing the popularity of the latter. In this paper, we investigate the relation between project popularity and regular, consistent documentation updates. We found strong indicators that consistently popular projects exhibited consistent documentation effort and that this effort tended to attract more documentation collaborators. We also found that frameworks required more documentation effort than libraries to achieve similar adoption success, especially in the initial phase.