The Free Software Development Quantitative Analysis

Nowadays, the usage of free software is generalized in companies, and more or less they have business strategy plans about it. Besides, in the crisis context public administrations and companies need to reduce costs and perform accurate evaluation of products. But the ecosystem of free software project is really different to private software products, since the development process in a free software project is usually openned and you could analyze aspects about source code, commits and the activity of developers (community members) committers, etc.

There are companies like Bitergia that is specialized in getting, providing and analyzing those metrics and information. With these analysis companies and public administratins could assess free software project, and thus they made the best election of software. But even more outstanding in my opinion is that they create dashboards that allow tracking free software project, helping to understand the health of community, in summary, an essential tool for take correct decisions.

In particular for public administration, the implementation of these dashboards could help to create a new paradigm for finance development by public administration, in this way they could drive the development of community with the information in the dashboard and even assess the contribution of different contributor and in some way financing them.

These dashboards have data about commits, developers, tickets, mails messages, files, and so on. For example, in the following picture you can see summary dashboard

In this picture you can see source code tracking, with data like commits, authors, files, lines added and removed.



Finally, in this picture you can see information about tickets and top companies. I wonder it this kind of information could be a model to assess companies to be financed by public administration development.



It is important to know that this dashboard has implemented by  MetricsGrimoire, VizGrimoire  and Bootstrap. Besides, in the bottom of each dashboard there are links for data source, so you could reproduce this graphs if you want.

If you are interested, you could access to other community metrics dashboards: Ceph, Wikipedia and gvSIG.

References:
[0] Bitergia
[1] OpenStack dashboard
[2] MetricsGrimoire
[3] VizGrimoire
[4] Bootstrap
[5] Ceph’s development dashboard
[6] Wikipedia Community Metrics dashboard
[7] gvSIG Desktop Analysis (Mar 2013)

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