You might have seen our last post about Grimoirelab joining Hacktoberfest. What is Grimoirelab and what makes this project special? Here are 3 facts you didn’t know about this open source project.
Fact 1: Is a software development analytics toolset
GrimoireLab is a collection of tools that are and always be 100% free and open source software, focused on software development analytics.
Everyone knows that it requires a great deal of effort to maintain open source projects and keep them well documented, frequently updated and alive.
During the past 7 years, GrimoireLab has been working to ensure its own project sustainability in the long-term. Indeed, there are different ways to define this term, but overall speaking, the list of things needed can be gathered into 5 different areas:
- Community management: having a diverse community and project maintainers, documented roadmaps and frequent meetings for developer directions
- Code Quality: having documented code review processes and test coverage.
- Support: being time efficient when answering issues and requests and having proper documentation for newcomers.
- Cross-community Collaboration: Coordinating and being involved with related projects to reduce potential conflicts.
- Security/Legal: having the project and its dependencies under not-conflicting OSI-approved licence.
This open source project ensures to fulfill all of these requirements, reducing risks and becoming a good choice when thinking about contributing to it or building products on top of its technology.
Fact 2: Is a technology used worldwide
Indeed, GrimoireLab is a technology used by well-known organizations and open source projects in four different ways:
- GrimoireLab is used by open source projects to understand what is happening in their communities, for example by the Mautic and LibreOffice.
- GrimoireLab is used by customers of the commercial Bitergia Analytics offering.
- GrimoireLab is used to jumpstart the development of highly customized metrics platforms like the Linux Foundation’s CommunityBridge Insights.
- GrimoireLab is being used to build the Metrics as a Service platform Cauldron.
Open source projects use GrimoireLab for community metrics
Mautic community uses GrimoireLab to analyze its contributors community with data from Git, GitHub, Meetup, and Slack. More information about how the community dashboard works can be found in the official mautic documentation.
Similarly, The Document Foundation operates a GrimoireLab metrics dashboard for the LibreOffice community. The Document Foundation offers a transparent overview of LibreOffice development.
Bitergia Analytics is a commercial offering built around GrimoireLab
The developers of GrimoireLab started the Bitergia company 8 years ago to provide professional services around these tools. Bitergia has worked with a variety of companies and open source foundations over the years, allowing GrimoireLab technology to make major impacts.
GrimoireLab, for example, was used for the Mozilla & the Rebels Alliance report, the OpenStack reports, managing the OpenShift community, revising Ubers open source strategy and numerous use cases.
Jumpstarting development of the Linux Foundation’s CommunityBridge Insights
You might have heard the news about CommunityBridge Insights, The Linux Foundation’s tool for project analytics. Did you also know that Community Bridge is built on top of GrimoireLab?
GrimoireLab solves specific pain points for CommunityBridge: resolving identity affiliation and gathering data.
GrimoireLab is able to deal with identity affiliation and gather data from different touch points such as Git, GitHUb, GitLab, Meetup, Discourse, Slack, Jekins, and Gerrit. This means providing automatic gathered data enrichment, merging duplicate identities, adding additional information about contributors affiliation, and calculating delays or geographical data.
This toolset was mission-critical for CommunityBridge’s goal to provide metrics in one single centralized place and to be able to identify contributors’ communities.
Having built on GrimoireLab to get a headstart on the development, the CommunityBridge platform is evolving rapidly — moving towards its own custom implementation for things like the user interface and custom backend features.
Metrics as a Service platform: Cauldron
The good news is that metrics are also available to non-LF projects. Cauldron.io is a SaaS metrics platform that is available to all open source projects. Cauldron.io, like Community Bridge Insights, builds on top of GrimoireLab.
During the last cauldron.io release, cauldron engineers add some interesting changes to the new project comparison page:
Fact 3: Is the software used in CHAOSS, community health metrics standard
3 years ago, Bitergia donated GrimoireLab to the CHAOSS project and The Linux Foundation. We have seen that since then Bitergia, has become a recognized reference implementation for open source metrics, project health analytics, and software development analytics.
Closing remarks
Community Bridge, Mautic Community dashboard, Cauldron.io, Bitergia Analytics or The Document Foundation are great outcomes coming from GrimoireLab project sustainability.
As an open source project, GrimoireLab is always looking for new and diverse contributors to help the project keep growing. As we already mentioned at the very beginning of the post, GrimoireLab is now participating in Hacktoberfest, the largest month-long celebration of open source software. Feel free to join the community here.
