Today, I’m presenting at IRILL (Paris) on “Measuring free software development“. The base of the talk is well known: most free / open source software projects have publicly available repositories with many details about how their activity. This given, how can we all (users, developers, integrators, etc.) profit from it? What kind of stuff can be measured using this data? Because you know, what you cannot measure, you cannot improve (or at least, know you’ve improved). And here is where MetricsGrimoire and Bitergia come to the rescue.
More in detail, changes in source code are recorded in the source code management system (Subversion, git, Mercurial, bazaar, etc.), along with who and when made the change, and other metainformation. Issue tracking (ticketing) systems (Bugzilla, Jira, etc.) record not only bug reports and how they are fixed, but also feature requests, design discussions, etc. Mailing lists, irc logs or forums carry information about discussions, user support, etc. All of this information, when properly analyzed, can be used to track how a project is performing, and to detect interesting patterns and potential or real problems early. The talk will focus on how all if this can be done with the tools in the MetricsGrimoire toolset, including some examples for specific projects.
If you’re interested, you can browse the slides.
