If There Are No Metrics, Did It Even Happen? Tracking Open Source Contributions at Comcast

Do you measure the health of your open source projects? Do you show it with metrics? Do these metrics include the number of downloads, forks, users, perhaps even mentions on Twitter? At Comcast, we want to grow and sustain useful software for the community. One of the ways we can do this is by measuring the health of open source projects we release, and by tracking contributors and commits to the projects.

Using collection methods from github.com, Comcast is tracking open source contributions in order to measure project health and where our developers are contributing to projects outside of Comcast. By using the traffic insights and the event stream available from GitHub, we are able to track the age of issues, pull requests, and contributions across the organization.

Using a combination of open source tools and server-less cloud technologies, we have been able to automate the collection of these metrics for use by our internal Open Source practice team to track and build communities around the tools we build.

Transcript

1. If There Are No Metrics, Did It Even Happen? Tracking Open Source Contributions at Comcast Shilla Saebi @shillasaebi David Grizzanti @dgrizzanti
2. Comcast Open Source Program Office Opened beginning of 2017 Support 7k+ developers Support 141 project repos on GitHub 4 person team
3. How do we quantify the work?
4. We needed a way to measure
5. Project health metrics can help us determine which projects are thriving.
6. Project health metrics can help us determine which ones may need attention.
7. Which projects are we contributing to? Are people outside of Comcast contributing to our projects? Which developers are actively contributing to open source projects? Which Comcast projects have an active community?
8. It was time to cross-collaborate.
12. Which projects are we contributing to? Are people outside of Comcast contributing to our projects? Which developers are actively contributing to open source projects? Which Comcast projects have an active community?
15. Tools
24. @shillasaebi @dgrizzanti