Bitergia - Software analytics for your peace of mind

In previous posts, MetricsGrimoire and FLOSSMetrics were presented to show how already existing Free/Open Source Software Projects already exist in order to obtain metrics and try to evaluate the Quality and State of the Art of software for a particular project, whether it is FLOSS or not.

However, these tools, that are focused on retrieval and storage of the projects on a Database in order to created structured data, do not focus on the analysis, presentation or exploitation of the data.
 For this reason, the company Bitergia, has created a set of tools that enable, on the one hand, an analysis framework, written in GNU-R, called VizGrimoireR, and, on the other hand, a Dashboard-like web presentation of the metrics analysed, through the VizGrimoireJS library. A demo can be observed on this link.

These tools, together with MetricsGrimoire, help on making the circle narrower in order to generate complete reports to help on diagnosing, analysing and improving software projects (Free/Open Source preferably, but not necessarily).

Examples of the kind of reports being generated are, for example:

Mediawiki: http://bitergia.com/public/previews/2012_11_mediawiki/
Webkit: http://bitergia.com/public/reports/webkit/2013_01/index.html
FusionForge: http://bitergia.com/public/previews/2012_11_fusionforge/
OpenStack (Havana Release): http://blog.bitergia.com/2013/10/17/the-openstack-havana-release/
LifeRay: http://blog.bitergia.com/2013/10/23/liferay-and-its-growth-during-the-last-years/

This company, which has still a long way to go, above all in the Private Companies environment, rather than Open Source Projects, is also a good example on how to provide services through Free/Open Source Software, justifying that business models around Open Source are possible to implement.

FLOSSmetrics

FLOSSmetrics (Free/Libre and Open Source Software Metrics) was a Project, funded by the European Commission, whose main objective was to retrieve and analyse a big database with information and metrics about Free/Open Source Software projects using already existing methodologies, and relying on already developed tools.

The project achieved the retrieval of more than 2800 FLOSS projects in Melquiades (lamentably down nowadays), by using existing Open Source tools such as CVSAnalY.

Among the most important broadcast activities, a talk in FOSSDEM 2009.

The main objectives of the project were:

- Identification and evaluation of sources of data.
- Creation of a comprehensive database from previous sources.
- Integration of already available tools to process data and create a complete platform for its availability.
- Maintenance of the empirical database by automation of extraction of data of thousands of Open Source projects with extraction tools.
- Develop of studies, (benchmarking, simulations and comparisons of FLOSS projects).
- Propagation and exploitation of the results.

To achieve the objectives, delivery of next Work Packages (WP) was performed:

• WP1 - Data Sources
• WP2 - Retrieval System
• WP3 - Database
• WP4 - Analyses
• WP5 - High Level Studies
• WP6 - Visualization
• WP8 - SMEs
• WP9 - Industrial Exp./Val.
• WP10 - Exploitation
• WP11 - Productivity

Among the different documents resultant of the project, FLOSS Guide for SMEs (small and medium enterprises) is a very interesting one, advent to present a set of guidelines and suggestions for the adoption of open source software within SMEs

On 2010, elaboration of a Final Report  concluded this very interesting and fruitful collaboration project.

Metrics Grimoire - A toolset to generate software metrics

As time goes by, it has been demonstrated that software metrics are important to categorize the status and health of a particular project, independently of the reason that it is or not an Open Source project.

Metrics Grimoire toolset allows to obtain certain amount of parameters from different kind of sources to generate metrics that enable analyzing a software project.

Among the different tools that the toolset provides, next ones are the most remarkable:

CVSAnalY: Do not be confused because of its name. CVSAnalY project analyzes different kind of repositories (CVS, as well as Subversion and GIT) and stores analyzed information on a SQL database. This information can be later analyzed in order to measure, for example:
- Most active committers.
- Number of commits in a period of time, or a a particular time or date.
- Territoriality of the project, by means of calculation of the different people modifying a particular file.
- And, in general, all the information that can be retrieved from that particular Software Configuration Manager.

Bicho: This tool allows to perform analysis on different Bug Trackers (Bicho means "Bug" in Spanish). The tool enables browsing different kind of Issue Trackers, and store some data from then in an SQL Database. Among the supported Issue Trackers, next ones are found:

- Bugzilla
- Launchpad
- Jira (unstable, partially supported)
- Allura (unstable, partially supported)
- Github (unstable, partially supported)
- SourceForge (abandoned)

The tool allows to obtain metrics such as:
- Number of issues of a particular state.
- Number of issues whose state changed on a particular period of time.
- Top Issue Openers/Resolvers/Closers
- People who have been assigned with a higher amount of Bugs
- And, in general, all the information that can be retrieved from that particular Issue Tracker.

MlStats: This tool allows to retrieve information from a mail list. It works basically with mailman. The tool allows to analyze information such as:
- Number of messages in a day for a particular mail list.
- Top askers and responders.
- % of messages responded.
- And, in general, all the information that can be retrieved from mailman mail list system.

To summarize, a very complete set of tools, which are Free Software (as in Freedom), which are costless, and wich enable to provide analysis of Open Source projects, but also Proprietary software on companies using previous described sources.