On the Usage of Badges in Open Source Packages on GitHub.

Continuously attracting contributors is key to the health of open source software projects. The appearance of badges in online collaborative development platforms affords maintainers the opportunity to advertise the quality of their project to potential contributors. We speculate that contributors rely on those badges to evaluate which projects they should contribute to. In this preliminary research, we analyse 14,592 GitHub package repositories for Cargo and 203,029 repositories for Packagist. We measure how prevalent badges are in those repositories, which badges are used, when and how they are introduced, and which combinations of badges co-occur. We find that the most widespread badges convey static information or relay information about the build status of a project. Those badges are typically added early in projects and prior to or at the same time as other badges.