Contributor Stats
Going to be working on a project around stats for the contributor community, something at which we currently suck (even creating the list of people with props each release is still a fairly manual process). For the sake of this exercise, ignore the voice in your head that thinks, “There’s no way to gather that information,” or “We’d need a new API for that,” and just brainstorm. What stats would it be cool for us to have about the activity of core contributors? Leave your ideas in the comments, and they’ll be cobbled together into a big list that I take to Otto to see what’s possible (at which point Nacin can start daydreaming about APIs, but not until then).
Jane Wells 11:52 am on December 28, 2012 Permalink
Some of my ideas:
Helen Hou-Sandi 2:24 pm on December 28, 2012 Permalink
I’m not a fan of the lines of code metric – removal is just as valuable, and sometimes more so. I probably come out close to zero
Jane Wells 2:28 pm on December 28, 2012 Permalink
Sorry, imprecise language on my part. Because I’ve been indoctrinated so well, my “lines of code” is shorthand for “lines of code changed,” not “lines of code added,” so removal/cleanup patches would still count based on lines affected.
Benjamin J. Balter 1:58 pm on December 28, 2012 Permalink
Jane Wells 2:29 pm on December 28, 2012 Permalink
Hey Ben. This one is just for core. Stats on plugins etc are being brainstormed on those make/teamname sites.
Scott Taylor 4:20 pm on December 28, 2012 Permalink
I like the idea of a historical leaderboard. Number of patches committed historically plus last commit date would separate “was active” and “is active.” I ran some perl / grep / sed earlier in the year to see how many patches Sergey had committed and it blew my mind. Also, I like the idea of distinguishing who works for Automattic-like companies and who doesn’t. If your job is *core*, it’s a lot easier to crush it every release than the people who are using 100% of their spare time to do it.
Matt Mullenweg 5:18 pm on December 28, 2012 Permalink
In terms of what can be extracted from SVN, Ohloh has some interesting stats for WP:
http://www.ohloh.net/p/wordpress
They also have some interesting historical data, like in Dec 2007 our codebase was 34.5% Javascript, Dec 2012 we’re about 19.6% (lines of PHP has increased way faster than lines of JS).
Andrea Rennick 10:37 pm on December 28, 2012 Permalink
OoooOOOoooo those stats are drool-worthy!
Aaron Jorbin 8:41 pm on December 28, 2012 Permalink
Number of people reporting bugs
Mean, median and mode of number of bugs reported by a person
Companies that contributed employee time towards WordPress core (and the number of hours per time period (not sure if per month or per release is a better metric here)
Number of patches submitted per ticket
Days between posts on nacin.com
Number of core contributors who don’t run there own blogs on WordPress
Andrea Rennick 10:28 pm on December 28, 2012 Permalink
Contributor status over releases. Like, if someone was around for 3.3, but not for 3.4 and back again for 3.5
And attrition rate – do people drop off or ramp up? Why or why not?
How many tickets or patches does one file, on average, before they get props that go in?