During 6th and 7th of June we have been at OpenExpo Europe 2018. Actually, we have been participating in OpenExpo since the first edition, years ago. But this one has been different, because it’s been the first time we’ve had a booth in a Spanish open source conference!
How was it? Why has it taken so long to do so?
We have sponsored OSCON for the last 2 years, and we are setting up everything up for the next one (don’t miss our workshop there!). And having a booth there has been always useful to get feedback, test interest, and get even hired for our services. Since most of our customers are from the USA, it’s an expected step.
But Europe has been always a different beast. We’ve had a booth in Paris for the French Open Source Summit, and we’ve had a GrimoireLab‘s table in FOSDEM for the last 2 years. Of course, the FOSDEM’s table is not a selling point but a community meeting point, so it doesn’t count. Doing business in Europe is definitively different than doing business in the USA and the customers in both sides have a different level of sophistication about the necessity of metrics and dashboards to track their activity. And we’ve been in many, many events: LinuxTag, OW2Con, LibreCon Europe, and others.
Spain is not that different from Europe in this sense. Indeed organizations are not that in the mood of using software development metrics, even when measuring is a common activity in the industry in other areas. And the usual question we have is:
Can I have a free (as beer) demo?
Of course, you can. But not many people want to get their hands dirty to run it. So, that’s our business, and by business I mean, that’s why we get paid.
So, why OpenExpo Europe?
As said before, we’ve been in OpenExpo since the first edition, and we can only congratulate the organization for growing such a great open source focus event from scratch. So, first of all, it was time to support them.
Second, we have new Bitergians, and not all of them have been able to be in our international conferences and booths. It’s been a nice experience to involve them in a booth closer to our office, and let them sell our services and products.
Booth ready at #OpenExpoEurope. Let's go!! pic.twitter.com/srM6sBElz4
— Bitergia (@Bitergia) June 6, 2018
And last, but not least, we have now stronger experience in inner source. Thanks to it, we can not only provide software engineering metrics and analytics, but evangelize about a more collaborative environment for software development inside companies. And our community analytics are quite useful to check the status of development teams from engineering and collaboration point of view. And this discourse has helped us to get some Spanish companies on board, so it was time to test it in a local conference.
How was it?
Of course, it’s early to evaluate the results from this bet, but the kind of people we have talked and shared our experience with has been very valuable. Even more than our initial expectations were, so, let’s see how it goes during next months.
Beyond the booth, we’ve been participating in 2 talks and a demo.
The first talk was about Bitergia Analytics:
The second one, was about GrimoireLab, and sadly, I haven’t had time to show some scripts I’ve prepared for a quick demo during the talk:
What’s next?
If you’ve been in OpenExpo and haven’t visited us, if you are looking for software development metrics for your software engineering team (for open and non-open source development), if you are driving your company digital transformation and you need data to check your software engineering development health, … you need us. Contact Bitergia!
