Metrics

Community Health Analytics in Open Software

Software metrics

Code Changes Lines: sum of number of lines touched in all changes to the source code during a certain period

• indicates volume of coding activity
• does not differentiate between adding, removing, comments, blank lines

Defect Resolution Duration: median time between report of defect and resolve of defect

• looks at labelled issues and pull requests

Code Changes Commits: number of commits that changes files considered as source code

• indicates volume of coding activity

Academic Open Source Project Impact: impact of open source project created by academics on university reappointment, tenure and promotion

• looks at citations of code
• number of community contributions from others than the research team

Project Popularity: combination of metrics

• social media mentions, forks, change requests
• new issues, stars, badges, likes
• new contributors
• ...

Licences Declared: number and types of specific licences declared in a software package

• transparency
• identification of conflicts

Technical Fork: number of forks, not clones

• contributing fork: opens pull request
• non-contributing fork: does not open a pull request

Bot Activity: number of bots

• indication of maturity
• indication of community size

Clones: local copies of repository

• insight into popularity and usage
• part of GitHub Traffic
  • only accessible with push access

Change Request Commits: number of code change commits in a change (pull) request

• larger number of commits signals higher complexity or more collaboration

Metrics models

Collaboration Development Index: health of current collaborative process

• contributors, downloads, code changes
• CI tests, change requests

Development Responsiveness: capacity of a project to operate and scale effectively

• duration metrics (review cycle, defect resolution, ...)

Lifecycle metrics

Time to Close: time between open and close for issue, change request, support ticket

• responsiveness of community
• detect changes in community activity

Change Requests: number of PRs

• volume of changes proposed to a project
• proxy for activity

Issues New, Issues Closed, Issues Reponse Time

• responsiveness depending on role in project
• popularity indicator

Time to First Response: first comment on issue/PR

• indicator for whether enough people are working on the project

Branch Lifecycle: how branches are managed

• are branches merged and deleted
• how long do branches usually live