Analysis of the retention rate of the Outreachy program in OpenStack

Mentoring is one of those activities key in any open source communities as well as in any other environment such as internally at companies. The new edition of the OpenStack gender report [to be published], produced by Intel and Bitergia, has focused specifically on those programs that help newcomers and filling the existing knowledge gap.

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Gender Diversity Studies and Talks Summary

When looking back nowadays to the work done on diversity, I’ve realized that it has been quite a trip! My first approach to the topic was in an informal meeting with Nithya Ruff, currently at Comcast. She mentioned that the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo reached (as far as I remember!) 13% of women attending the Summit. And this was a great number if compared to previous summits as the percentage kept growing. But she also mentioned that they received a tweet asking about the current number of technical contributions. Then this is where we decided to have a look at that issue: have numbers, and try to produce some of them from a quantitative point of view.

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OpenStack gender/diversity technical contributions analysis

Since last OpenStack Summit in Tokyo we were wondering at Bitergia if we could mix our knowledge on Software Development Metrics and some research we had done about gender/diversity contributions in Debian long time ago. Daniel started working on it, and he submitted a talk for OpenStack Summit in Austin that got accepted!

Updated: Vídeo and slides already available..

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On the Importance of Quarterly Reports : OPNFV and OpenStack as use cases

Public quarterly reports are used for understanding the performance of companies. And so, quarterly reports done by Bitergia fill the gap of understanding the performance of open source communities. This type of analysis focuses on those that are still interested in metrics, but do not have the time to play with the dashboards. This indeed provides a full overview of the current quarter, but adds a comparison with the previous quarters. This allows to have some extra context about where the community is heading.

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The Mitaka OpenStack mid-cycle quarterly report

[This post is based on the executive summary of the 2015-Q5 OpenStack Community Activity Report, sponsored by the OpenStack Foundation]

The October-Devember 2015 penStack Community Activity Report shows a stable growth of the OpenStack Community. As new repositories and teams keep being added, the number of projects keeps growing. On the other hand it is worth mentioning the decrease in activity during the latest quarters in project teams such as Nova, or stabilization of some others, such as Horizon or Cinder. This is a clear signal of the maturity reached by the some of the project teams in the OpenStack Foundation.

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Some developers are more equal than others

In a large free, open source software development community, not all developers are equal. Some are more experienced, some are better known, some know better how to adhere to the uses and customs of the project, some write code that is more easily accepted by others. One of the areas where these differences are more noticeable is the code review process. It is not equally easy for all developers to push their patches through code review. Even when the process itself tries to be fair and unbiased, well, “all developers are equal, but some are more equal than others”.

openstack-gerrit-db

Fortunately, we have plenty of data in the code review system. We can use analytics on that data to learn about how difficult it is for developers to get their patches accepted. We will use a OpenStack code review dashboard, composed with data from the OpenStack Gerrit instance to illustrate the process.

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Understanding the code review process in OpenStack

As a part of our tests with Kibana and Elasticserch as frontends for our MetricsGrimoire databases, we’ve set up a dashboard for understanding the code review process in OpenStack (be sure of visiting it with a large screen and a reasonable CPU, otherwise your experience may be a bit frustrating).

Screenshot from 2015-10-22 00-24-53This dashboard includes information about all review processes (changesets) in OpenStack, using information obtained from their Gerrit instance. For each review, we have information such as the submitter (owner), the time it was first uploaded and accepted or abandoned, the number of patchsets (iterations) needed until it was accepted, and the time until it was merged or abandoned. With all of them we have prepared an active visualization that allows both to understand the big picture and to drill down looking for the details. Follow on reading to learn about some of these details.

[Note: this is our second post about our dashboards based on Kibana. If you’re interested, have a look at the first one, about OpenStack code contributions.]

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Testing Kibana: OpenStack code contributions dashboard

We at Bitergia are busy testing new stacks for analyzing and visualizing the software development data we collect. Some our latest tests involve using Kibana for visualization. In this case, we have prepared a dashboard showing the latest contribution data for OpenStack.

Screenshot from 2015-10-19 01-28-46Screenshot from 2015-10-19 01-29-27One of the nice things that these new dashboards allow is the level of filtering and drill down which is possible. For example, in the above dashboard, it is possible to click on any sector on a pie chart, on any entry of a table, on any bar in a bar chart, and the corresponding filter will act. This allows for obtaining specialized dashboards very easily, such as this one with the contributions by RedHat (produced by clicking on RedHat in the list of of top organizations, or the contributions to Liberty, the latest release cycle of OpenStack, by selecting the corresponding period (last bar) in the “OpenStack ten top organizations by release” chart.

If you’re interested in learning about some tips and tricks about what can be done with these dashboards, follow on reading…

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Mid Liberty Release Cycle: OpenStack Quarterly Report

Finally we released a new version of the OpenStack Quarterly report. This is intended to provide insights about the software development process of the OpenStack projects. This covers information from several data sources such as Git, Launchpad, Gerrit, Mailing lists, ask.openstack.org and IRC channels. And it aims at providing quantitative and qualitative information about the activity, community and software process.

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