There are any number of metrics, heuristics, entrail-reading techniques, etc. which can be used to determine whether or not a project is "alive" for a variety of meanings of that word. Depending on what you need to use a project for, you might need to make such an assessment and so this week I'd like to give you a few ways to assess a software project's "liveness". In addition, you might be a project developer who needs to assess the "liveness" of something you're working on yourself. (For example, to check it's well organised for your expected user-base).

If you're trying to use a project in a production situation, then you likely want to look to whether the codebase is relatively stable, whether it makes sensibly structured releases with some kind of semantic versioning, what its tracker looks like (relatively few open BUGS, short times between bug reports and fixes), and what its documentation looks like. You may also look for evidence that others rely on the project, but that's perhaps less important. It's fine for the codebase to have a lot of churn providing there seems to be some commitment to a stable/reliable interface (be that a CLI or an API).

If, on the other hand, you're looking for a project to use in a fairly experimental situation, you may be looking for a project whose developers are very active and responding well to feature requests, bug reports, etc., however, here the number of open bugs is much less relevant than the way in which the developers react to new uses of their codebase.

If you're looking for a project to contribute to, then assuming you've already determined your own interest in the project to be high, I'd suggest that you look to the developers/community: how active (or otherwise) they are, how well they respond to comments/queries/issues/bugs etc.. A project which is beautifully written but whose developers take months over responding to simple queries might not be suitable for you to join. On the other hand, a nicely written project whose developers are essentially absent is very much ripe for an offer of adoption and/or simple forking.

(As a corollary, if you're a project developer and someone turns up looking at your project and you know it's not right for them, consider pointing them somewhere else.)

So, in summary, useful things to look at include:

• The churn in the project codebase
• Whether the project has adopted semantic versioning
• Whether the project makes lots of bugfix releases or seems stable
• How well the project team responds to new issues/bugs
• How well the project accepts contributions.

This week your homework is to assess a project you're part of, with the eyes of someone who might be coming to it to use/contribute-to. See if you can find ways you could improve your own projects, and give it a go.