It’s amazing to see how an open source project such as GrimoireLab, born from an academic research team, is now one of the key components in providing metrics for the Linux Foundation ecosystem.
The use of GrimoireLab in Community Bridge Insights is just another milestone in the GrimoireLab story – a remarkable open source success story. GrimoireLab demonstrates how open source software development levels the playing field, enabling new kinds of collaboration. The project was born 16 years ago at the LibreSoft research group at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, Spain. Researchers sought to replicate studies on open source projects as a commitment to their efforts to release their own tools as open source. The company Bitergia was founded seven years ago as a steward for the GrimoireLab tools, and to respond to increasing industry demand for metrics and analytics on open source projects. The people behind GrimoireLab and Bitergia could not have dreamed that one day their open source tools would be used by the Linux Foundation to provide metrics for some of the largest open source projects in the world.
When Community Bridge Insights meets Bitergia: Strategy on top of metrics
One of the main questions heard by Bitergia over the past 15 years working in software development analytics is, “What do I do with all the data?”
Lord Kelvin said, “to measure is to know.” However, data does not mean anything unless we can build a strategy around it! If we can align metrics with business goals, we will know how to gain actionable insights from metrics. Due to its experience helping organization’ projects and open source foundations, Bitergia knows that gaining those insights requires domain knowledge about open source projects, a deep understanding of collaboration processes and experience with the data models.
At a first glance, it’s good to have numbers and metrics, but not all the metrics are suitable in every situation for all stakeholders. Because open source software projects are diverse, so are their goals and so should be their key metrics.
Metrics for everyone: Cauldron.io
The LF’s Community Bridge Insights is a milestone not just for Bitergia and the GrimoireLab project, but also for the open source movement. For the first time, LF projects will have a go-to place to see metrics about themselves.
What about other open source projects? The good news is that metrics are also available to non-LF projects. Meet Cauldron.io, a SaaS metrics platform that is available to all open source projects. Cauldron.io, like Community Bridge Insights, builds on top of GrimoireLab.
A word of caution, Cauldron.io is in alpha and looks for user feedback but will probably not satisfy everyone’s needs nor yet have the scalability we are working towards. Anyone can go to Cauldron.io and immediately start getting metrics for their open source projects.
Closing Thoughts
Cauldron.io and Community Bridge Insights are two options for open source projects who want to have metrics. Both build on top of the same metrics engine GrimoireLab, demonstrating how open source benefits all through a collaborative software development approach.
When starting a metrics journey, providing metrics is indeed the first move. However, if we want to use software development analytics to drive data among projects, we need to customize those metrics, building a clear goal-question-metrics strategy on top of it.
That is why Bitergia, the company behind GrimoireLab, is there – to help customers establish their personalized metric strategies and provide a customizable metrics platform. Check out bitergia.com for details.
