I want to share with you a recent Bitergia Radar Report that we created for a customer so as to show you the types of valuable metrics and insights we can provide about the health of your open source projects and communities.
We use metrics to analyze developer activity and community health. The insights we provide can empower decision-making and put your mind at ease that you are acting on data and knowledge.
Our Customer's Dilemma: A Major Player Exits
This particular customer was worried. They had invested in a component, but now there were changes in that project’s community. Specifically, a major player was leaving. This got them asking: Was this change going to impact the sustainability of the project? Was it wise to continue to put resources into it?
Basically, they wanted to know: Were they betting on the right horse?
They reached out to us to understand this change, and to know whether or not they needed to take action. So we collected metrics to analyze the underlying dynamics of the project to help answer their questions.
Is the Project Sustainable?: A Deep Dive
Assessing Overall Community Activity
The first thing we look at when we perform a Radar Report is the overall community activity. We collect and analyze performance metrics to see whether the community is keeping up with activity like feedback and code reviews.
When we analyzed metrics for this customer’s project, we found the project to be healthy: contributors were active and efficient in their processes.
Analyzing Contributor Dynamics and Collaboration
Then, we zoom in further to analyze metrics on contributors themselves and the dynamics between contributing organizations.
This was the main worry of our customer, since a major player was leaving. But what we found surprised them. Although one company was leaving, another large IT company had joined. This company was acting as a central player. They were collaborating with different teams and companies on many different components.
The chart below depicts the organizations contributing. Although the names of organizations are left out here, they are represented by blue nodes. Meanwhile, the orange boxes are the GitHub repositories that these organizations are contributing to. The thicker the blue node, the greater the number of code contributions submitted. The thicker the connecting link, the greater the number of contributions of the organizations to that repository.
One of the two large nodes is the company that is leaving. They have made many contributions, but their focus has been more narrow, primarily working on a few repositories. The new major player (the other large node), however, has been a leader in both number of contributions and in the number of repositories they contribute to. Having a leader like this one that actively contributes and collaborates effectively with others is a marker of a project’s health and sustainability.
We also discovered that a new set of smaller companies were also actively contributing, adding to the sustainability. The more diverse a project’s contributor base is, the stronger the project is moving forward.
Looking for Silos
Another thing we look for is silos– areas of the project where contributors are not interacting with one another. In this case, we did not identify silos. Rather, this new central player we identified before was leading others in collaboration across components.
Evaluating Component Health
And when it comes to components, the metrics showed that the main ones of the project were quite healthy. One component had some risk to it, as the leaving company was its main contributor and they had already reduced their contributions. The other components, however, which are all well-known and very used– have a healthy level of activity.
Is This the Project to Bet On?: Benchmarking Competitors:
The final analysis we gave this customer was a comparison between the project they had invested in and three of the projects’ competitors. Only one of these three turned out to be a real competitor. They had grown a large community quickly, and that community continues to grow. But when we analyzed the performance of the backlog, and how this competitor was dealing with things like issues and pull requests, we found that the customer’s current project is the stronger one from a performance point of view.
Our big advice to our customer was that they can feel secure with the current project, at least in the short term.
It has an active and effective community that collaborates well and responds quickly, all showing its stability. However, we also suggested that our customer keep an eye on this other competitor. It is growing fast, and it may offer opportunities for innovation in the future.
Decision-Making with Data
We want our Bitergia Radar Reports to offer our customers– like they did for this customer– metrics and insights that help them move forward with confidence.
We see too many organizations making important decisions without data to back them up. And we believe that in open source, the right data and the right analysis is essential to making proactive and informed decisions.
Find out more about our services on our website.
This blog post was written by Luis Cañas-Díaz with help from Julia Lawson.
