Bitergia year in review is here for 2020! This post summarizes Bitergia’s main activities across this year: The new OSS Community Metrics as a service platform, the growth in business and as a result, the growth in our team and main GrimoireLab improvements. Keep reading to learn more!
🦺 Bitergia’s response to Coronavirus
We don’t like the world-wide situation due to Coronavirus anymore than everyone else. While we would like to pretend it didn’t exist, we have to acknowledge the new reality we live in.
Bitergia is located in Madrid, Spain and was subject to precautionary measures. Bitergians were always allowed to work remotely, so complying with the lock-down was easy for us. With employees across three continents, Bitergia was well-equipped to close its office.
From the comfort of our homes and looking at the Linux Kernel, Kubernetes, and Hyperledger, we were concerned that the pandemic would have devastating consequences on open source communities. Upon a second look, the attention may simply have shifted to an impressive response by open source communities to help fight the Coronavirus. We are also happy to demonstrate the value of transparency and adoption that come from developing contact tracing apps as open source software.
During the ongoing pandemic, we most of all miss having coffee together. We also miss meeting with customers at open source conferences.
We have been showcasing how important are OSPO for OS ecosystems sustainability at State of the Source, All Things Open and Open Core Summit. Topics regarding InnerSource and metrics strategy were presented at InnerSource Commons Europe. Moreover, we had a few Open Source DevRel and Community Building presentations at InnerSource Commons Europe and Open Source Summit NA as well as an interesting DevRel metrics panel discussion at DevRelCon Earth. Community health and OSS Foundations were two remarkable topics at SCaLe, GUADEC, Open Source Summit NA and State of the Source. Last but not least, FOSDEM and CHAOSSCon Europe were the two conferences where showcased internal developments regarding identity affiliation and new analytics tools such as Caudlron.
On the other hand, we also presented some software development analytics studies like Open Source COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps and Building community metrics for GNOME and everyone as well as some of the work done with Uber Open Source and OpenShift.
🔥 OSS Community Metrics aaS: Cauldron
Bitergia Analytics traditional business has grown: now we are working for 2 of the top 3 cloud providers and more organizations willing to manage effectively collaborative software development methodologies. On the other hand, we have started exploring new ways to provide services to organizations and projects.
Cauldron has been on fire this year with more than 22 releases. Our ongoing R&D project Cauldron is a Metrics as a Service (MaaS) platform. We have overcome many challenges for scaling up analytics for open source communities.
One of the best rewards of this work is hearing from people across many organizations how much they appreciate the easy to get insights from Cauldron.
A recurring theme in 2020 was for managers to thank us for the insights that allowed them to report on their open source projects using Cauldron.
Cauldron has also been successfully validated on-prem in Red Hat’s enterprise setting. The on-prem solution offers exclusive features like corporate affiliation management of contributors.
🌏 Growing the Bitergia team
The good news is that software development analytics is becoming more important and we sign on new customers all the time. The growth in business required us to grow our team. We were excited to welcome Eva and Venu as two new team members. Eva is from Spain. Venu is from India.
Bitergia now spans three continents around the world: Europe, India, and North America. We are committed to diversity and inclusion. Truely, we have come a long way since we started to travel internationally to showcase our work.
New Bitergia team updates are that we are still hiring! Check our open remote job positions: Back-end Developer and Analytics Consultant.
🎉 5 Years of GrimoireLab
Five years ago, we began work on GrimoireLab. We had learned a lot from our FLOSSMETRICS research and development at LibreSoft and the beginning years of Bitergia. GrimoireLab would incorporate some tough lessons learned and provide a flexible software development analytics platform.
GrimoireLab has become the foundation of our service offerings. An important step towards the success was the founding of the CHAOSS project three years ago which brought more visibility for the GrimoireLab project. GrimoireLab is not just for analyzing open source projects but also for analyzing internal software projects that use private repositories. We couldn’t be more proud to see it picked up across other organizations.
For example, Ruth Cheesley set up GrimoireLab for the Mautic community and has been including insights in her quarterly Mautic Community Roundups (Q1, Q2, Q3). Hear more about it on the CHAOSScast episode #8 with Ruth Cheesley.
A major cause for celebration was that GrimoireLab grew up to power The Linux Foundation’s LFX Insights platform. This new platform is the first major implementation of GrimoireLab by an organization other than Bitergia.
Over the years, we continue to pay it forward through mentoring young people through the GrimoireLab project. We participated for the first time in Hacktoberfest and continued to participate in Google Summer of Code. Two of these mentorship projects were highlighted in CHAOSScast episode #21 with Ria Gupta and Venu Vardhan Reddy Tekula. Ria prototyped the CHAOSS Metric: Social Listening in collaboration with our friends Venia Logan and Dylan Marcy from SociallyConstructed.online. Venu advanced quality models implementation in GrimoireLab with insights from the EU-funded CROSSMINER research project.
Contributing to GrimoireLab is open to everyone and super easy to start with. If you are an open source enthusiast looking for new challenges, we recommend you to take a look to the following GrimoireLab tools:
- Python developers and data engineers: Perceval, Graal, Arthur, SortingHat, GrimoireELK, Mordred, Manuscript, Sigils
- Web developers: GrimoireLab Website
- Tech Content creators: GrimoireLab Website, Grimoirelab documentation.
🔜 Outlook on 2021
We go strong into the next year with plans to grow and thrive. We may hire additional positions to grow our team and satisfy incoming demand for our services. Of course, we hope that we will be able to travel again soon and meet again in-person for a coffee both with Bitergians and our customers. Meanwhile, we can always have a coffee-chat!
We also have some improvements of our software development analytics platform in store. The affiliations management user interface is getting a complete overhaul and some recommender features. Behind the scenes, GrimoireLab is migrating to OpenDistro for Elasticsearch. Other improvements and new features to come are driven by our customers that have very interesting use cases.
We wish you all the best, jolly holidays, and a happy new year!
