Introducing the Software Stability Index (SSI)

The Software Stability Index (SSI) is a new methodology and open-source scoring system designed to assess the long-term sustainability of developer tools — programming languages, SDKs, APIs, frameworks, and IDEs.

In a world where tutorials go stale within months, packages silently break - some only days after you started using them, and LLMs hallucinate outdated advice, the SSI offers a grounded, reproducible way to evaluate:

• Learnability — how easy it is to learn and get help for a tool
• Applicability — how well it maps to real-world use cases
• Sustainability — how resilient it is over time (release churn, lockfile rot, etc.)

The SSI outputs a normalized score between 0.0 and 10.0 and includes breakdowns like tutorial freshness, SemVer fidelity, ecosystem abandonment, and lockfile reproducibility.

It is not a popularity contest, but a lens through which to gauge long-term engineering viability. Developers, tech leads, and framework maintainers alike can benefit from this scoring framework to make smarter choices and build more future-proof software.

➡️ Visit the SSI GitHub Repository

As an article from GOZmosis points out, this cycle of "rapid, potentially problematic releases" can disrupt workflows, cause productivity loss, and erode trust. Yet, this growing problem is not discussed nearly enough, leaving developers and technical leaders to navigate a volatile ecosystem with very little objective data.

This is just the beginning — contribute, test, and help shape a smarter way to reason about modern tooling.

The Problem: The "Beta-fication" of Production Software

In today''s fast-paced digital landscape, there is immense pressure to innovate and release new software constantly. This has led to a troubling trend: major software publishers, including tech giants, often release products with known bugs, effectively turning their user base into a distributed, unpaid quality assurance team.

This cycle of "rapid, potentially problematic releases" can disrupt workflows, cause productivity loss, and erode trust. Yet, this growing problem is not discussed nearly enough, leaving developers and technical leaders to navigate a volatile ecosystem with very little objective data. The Software Stability Index (SSI) was created to address this gap.

Our Mission: Towards Objective Stability Metrics

The goal of SSI is to move beyond marketing hype and anecdotal evidence, providing an objective, quantifiable score for the real-world stability of the tools we use every day. We aim to:

• Empower Developers & Leaders: Provide clear, data-driven insights to help them make informed technology choices.
• Promote Accountability: Encourage tool maintainers to prioritize long-term stability over feature velocity.
• Create a New Heuristic: Establish a transparent, reproducible, and community-driven standard for measuring software health.

How It Works: A Multi-Dimensional Score

The SSI gives each tool or platform a normalized score from 0.0 to 10.0. This score is a weighted average of three core dimensions:

Sustainability (Weight: 45%)

Sustainability is the most heavily weighted category, as it measures the long-term viability, maintainability, and resilience of a technology. A high sustainability score indicates that a system built with the technology will be stable, predictable, and cost-effective to maintain over time.

• S1: Frequency of Breaking Changes: Measures how often the technology introduces breaking changes, violating Semantic Versioning or failing to provide backward compatibility.
• S2: Unresolved Issue Backlog: Calculates the percentage of unresolved issues in the official repository over the last 12-24 months.
• S3: LLM Problem-Solving Success Rate: Measures the success rate of leading LLMs in fixing real-world bugs, a proxy for how "known" the problem space is.
• S4: Dependency Graph Volatility: Assesses the stability of the technology''s core dependencies.
• S5: Community Support Resolution Time: Measures the average time it takes to get a correct answer from community channels like Stack Overflow.
• S6: Backward Compatibility Support: Evaluates the project''s official policy and track record for supporting older versions.

Learnability (Weight: 30%)

Learnability measures the ease of learning and the availability of valid, up-to-date educational resources. A high learnability score indicates that a developer can quickly become proficient.

• L1: Tutorial & Documentation Freshness: Measures how up-to-date the official documentation and community tutorials are.
• L2: MOOC & Video Platform Coverage: Assesses the quantity and quality of courses on platforms like Coursera, Udemy, and YouTube.
• L3: Diversity of Learning Formats: Evaluates the availability of different types of learning resources (docs, videos, interactive sandboxes).
• L4: LLM Answer Freshness & Success Rate: Measures the ability of leading LLMs to generate accurate and currently valid solutions to common problems.

Applicability (Weight: 25%)

Applicability assesses the breadth of use cases a technology can effectively address, the health of its ecosystem, and the ease of integration with other tools.

• A1: Ecosystem & Package Diversity: Measures the number and popularity of third-party libraries and packages.
• A2: Integration Friction Score: Evaluates how smoothly the technology integrates with adjacent tools, platforms, and APIs.
• A3: API Completeness & Documentation Quality: Assesses how comprehensive and well-documented the core APIs are.

Why This Matters

• Tutorials break. Stack Overflow answers age out—too soon.
• Frameworks churn. Packages abandon their users—too soon.
• LLMs give wrong advice because their training data go stale—too soon.

Software engineering deserves better metrics.

Get Involved: Help Us Build a Better Heuristic!

Tired of frameworks that break on patch releases? Frustrated by tutorials that are already outdated? You''re not alone. The SSI is an ambitious open-source project aiming to bring transparency and accountability to the software ecosystem. We need your expertise to build a truly comprehensive and objective index.

➡️ Visit the SSI GitHub Repository to contribute!

This is just the beginning — contribute, test, and help shape a smarter way to reason about modern tooling.

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