Development Community Metrics: How to use available data

Free / open source software development communities are producing large quantities of high quality data, which can be retrieved from their development repositories (source code management system, issue tracking system, mailing lists, etc.). These data can be used to learn about those communities, and how they are evolving. Many questions can be answered with precise information, such as how the community as a whole is performing, who is key in it, who is entering and who is leaving, etc. This talk will present some real-world cases of how these and other questions can be answered, based on the use of the Grimoire Dashboard to extract, analyze and visualize the data. These cases will illustrate how real communities are using the resulting information, and how this use could be improved.

Transcript

1. Development Community Metrics: How to use available data Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona jgb@bitergia.com @jgbarah Bitergia / LibreSoft (URJC) http://bit.ly/devel-community-metrics European Community Leadership Summit 2014 Berlin (Germany), May 9th 2014 Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 1 / 31
2. c 2012-2014 Bitergia Some rights reserved. This presentation is distributed under the “Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0” license, by Creative Commons, available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 2 / 31
3. Structure of the presentation 1 Development communities analytics: from data to knowledge 2 Tools 3 The many views of a development community Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 3 / 31
4. Development communities analytics: from data to knowledge Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 4 / 31
5. Bitergia: analytics for your peace of mind Started operations in July 2012 Builds on the experience of LibreSoft R&D group Offering professional products and services Focused on: Grimoire Dashboard: software development analytics (including community metrics) Specific studies and reports (based on metrics and facts collection) http://bitergia.com http://blog.bitergia.com Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 5 / 31
6. Free software is (in many cases) special Source code available Open development model (usually) Details about the internals of the development activity Intense use of tools for coordination Lots of information is tracked, and available Developers & users communities are important sustainability pooling of resources innovation Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 6 / 31
7. Measuring, measuring, measuring Information about code, community, development can be retrieved, organized, analyzed Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 7 / 31
8. But data has to be extracted, mined... Data lives in repositories not always designed to release all their data easily: tools are needed to retrieve and extract it Data includes many complexities and details tools are needed to filter, organize it Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 8 / 31
9. But data has to be analyzed, visualized... Casual observation is not enough: tools are needed for statistical and other kinds of analysis Analysis is not enough: tools are needed for interactive visualization Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 9 / 31
10. Tools Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 10 / 31
11. Data lives in many different systems Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 11 / 31
12. Grimoire: tools for retrieval, analysis, visualization MetricsGrimoire vizGrimoire Grimoire Dashboard Data retrieval Analysis, User from visualization interaction, repositories panels, views Free software Commercial support available Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 12 / 31
13. Tools: Grimoire Dashboard [Dashboard for the GlusterFS project http://projects.bitergia.com/redhat-glusterfs-dashboard/] Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 13 / 31
14. The many views of a development community Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 14 / 31
15. How are you attracting / retaining talent? [Puppet committers community: Attraction / retention] Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 15 / 31
16. How are you attracting / retaining talent? (2) [Linux kernel: age of developers per cohort] http://blog.bitergia.com/2013/02/01/ demographics-of-linux-kernel-developers-how-old-are-they/ Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 16 / 31
17. How long is it taking to address issues? Liferay: time-to-close tickets (quantiles) http://blog.bitergia.com/ 2012/10/25/preview-of-the-analysis-of-liferay/ Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 17 / 31
18. How is your community dealing with issues? [MediaWiki community: tickets-related parameters] Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 18 / 31
19. In which parts of the system are your developers active? actions authors per actions 0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0 arch/arc arch/arm arch/i386 arch/mips arch/powerpc arch/s390 arch/tile arch/x86 drivers/acpi drivers/char drivers/dma drivers/gpu drivers/media drivers/net drivers/scsi drivers/spi drivers/staging drivers/tty drivers/usb fs/btrfs fs/ceph fs/cifs fs/ext4 fs/f2fs fs/nfs fs/xfs include/linux net/ipv4 arch Documentation drivers fs include kernel net sound tools virt [Linux kernel: changes per directory during 2013] Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 19 / 31
20. Where are your developers working? (2) actions authors per actions 0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0 arch/alpha arch/arm arch/i386 arch/ia64 arch/m68k arch/mips arch/powerpc arch/ppc arch/ppc64 arch/sh arch/sparc64 arch/um arch/x86 arch/x86_64 drivers/acpi drivers/block drivers/char drivers/ide drivers/input drivers/isdn drivers/media drivers/net drivers/scsi drivers/usb drivers/video fs/jfs fs/nfsfs/nfsd fs/ntfs fs/xfs include/asm−x86 include/linux net/inet net/ipv4 net/sctp sound/oss sound/pci arch block drivers fs include kernel lib net sound [Linux kernel: changes per directory during 2013] Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 20 / 31
21. How is corporate involvement evolving? [Main companies contributing to OpenStack (no. of commits)] http://activity.openstack.org/dash/releases/ Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 21 / 31
22. How is corporate involvement evolving? (2) [IBM participation in OpenStack Havana (partial view)] http://activity.openstack.org/dash/releases/company.html?company=IBM Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 22 / 31
23. Who is contributing? [MediaWiki top contributors (January 2013)] Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 23 / 31
24. How are developers participating in the community? [oVirt developer profile] Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 24 / 31
25. How much neutral is your community? q q q q q q q q 0 1 2 3 250 500 1000 2000 4000 Number of accepted reviews Iterations per accepted review (median) [WebKit code review data per company (2012)] Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 25 / 31
26. Where do developers work? 0e+00 1e+05 2e+05 −10 −5 0 5 10 Timezones (relative to GMT) Messages [Linux kernel mailing list, all messages until late 2013] Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 26 / 31
27. Where do developers work? (2) 0 5000 10000 15000 −10 −5 0 5 10 Messages 0 10000 20000 30000 −10 −5 0 5 10 Messages [Linux kernel mailing list, all messages in 2002, 2012] Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 27 / 31
28. Takeaway There is a lot of data about your community With the adequate tools, useful knowledge can be extracted from it Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 28 / 31
29. Relationship with EU-funded R&D projects Markos: License analyzer New tools for software development analysis Production of linked open data PROSE: Software development analytics to track results of R&D projects Open Source Projects Europe forge: development analytics facilities http://www.markosproject.eu/ http://www.ict-prose.eu/ https://opensourceprojects.eu/ Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 29 / 31
30. Announce: FLOSS Community Metrics Meeting Bringing together people interested in FLOSS (free, libre, open source software) metrics to discuss the FLOSS tools currently available in this area. July 20th 2014, Portland, USA (Close to Community Leadership Summit and OSCON) http://flosscommunitymetrics.org/ Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 30 / 31
31. This is the end [Questions, comments...] Examples of real Grimoire Dashboards: http://bitergia.com/dashboards/ Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona (Bitergia) Development Community Metrics ECLS 2014 31 / 31