A New Metrics Well

A major component of the work being done within the Open Source and Standards team focuses on what we can do to make communities healthy and prosperous.

To that end, we are working with metrics to obtain quantifiable numbers about the projects with which we work, to identify areas of a project that are doing well or might need assistance. We are happy to working with Project CHAOSS for this, since this project has made great strides in determining what actually makes a community healthy.

But it's not just the OSAS team that is interested in metrics. All across Red Hat, developers and teams are expressing an interest in metrics, too. Some of this interest is focused on overall project health, and some is about finding the individuals who are making the best contribution.

One of these colleagues is Fabien Boucher, who has been working on a web application that compiles useful statistics out of git repositories with which Red Hat is working. Currently, Boucher has identified around 300 projects with about 8000 git repositories hosted on GitHub. This includes projects like Python, OpenShift, JBoss, OpenStack, and Kubernetes, to name a few.

Boucher says he wanted to show how much Red Hat contributes to Open Source, backed with hard numbers. He used the official Red Hat GitHub page  as a starting point for the projects included in the application, but is also seeking more projects, if available, to list on the site. This service is provided with repoXplorer, part of the broader Software Factory project.

The data in the application can be viewed by project, contributor, and group. Information can be filtered by dates, and statistics can be aggregated over multiple repositories defining a project.

Feel free to take a look and see the impact contributors are having on open source projects.

Image provided by geralt, under CCO license.