I am Claudia and I am here to share my knowledge about community "measurement". At the moment, I am mainly working/talking with Sumana and Mark, so they can tell you more about me :)

Other sources of information are:


The main reason for starting this page is to have a place for collecting ideas about measures to evaluate the evolution of a community. And this is what you find here at the moment...

Community metrics

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There are many data available in an open source project such as MediaWiki but rather looking at all at once I prefer to start with one data repository. More accidentially or because of an exisiting need I started with the bug repository and so, this list will start with some measures from the bug repository. And because in an open source software project (almost) everything is about software, I started the list with possible measures from the SVN repository as well. More measures to other data repositories will hopefully follow soon...

The priority should be defined by a Likert scale with

  • Very Important equals four stars (****)
  • Important equals three stars (***)
  • Moderately Important equals two stars (**)
  • Of Little Importance equals one star (*)
  • Unimportant equals zero stars ( )

Bugzilla

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Measure name Description Extensions Priority
number of bug reports simply the number of submitted reports ... per component, per month, per person, per status (open, closed, etc.), per priority ...
number of bug reporters number of distinct people who submitted at least one bug ... per time interval, per priority
number of bug reports per reporter self-explanatory ..., per priority, can be extended by groups of reporters (volunteers, paid developers)
Time needed to close a bug time (e.g.) in days between the open and the closed status (problem, there are many bugs that are reopened several times) ... depending on
Average life time of a bug survival analysis can be used ... per priority
Number of post-release bugs number of bugs that have been submitted after a release concerning a release ... per time interval
Number of submitted patches number of attachments that are marked as patch ... per time interval, per release, per reporter


Measure name Description Extensions Priority
Number of committers people with at least one commit (here the inactivity should be taken into account) ... per file, per module, per time interval, per release cycle
Number of commits just the number of all commits ... per file, per module, per time interval, per release cycle
Number of new committers Developers with access rights or one commit ... per time interval
Average period of activity Length of period of time a developer is active (last commit minus first commit)


Include the following sources: