Committers
Question: How robust are the contributors to a community?
Overview
Committers measure the number of developers who have committed code changes into the project's repository. Code contributions varires from larger scale contributors to documentation authors, individuals who open issues, or other types of contributions, depending on the management style employed by an open source project. A higher number of committers generally indicates a project's health and its likelyhood of receiving updates, support, and necessary resources in the future. This metric allows organizations to assess the risk of a project being abandoned or under-supported due to limited code contributors. McDonald et al. (2014) point out the varying leadership styles in open-source projects can impact the number contributors. Fewer code contributors may indicate projects less open to outside contributions, or simply projects that have a small number of developers contributing to the code base. A project with a diverse group of committers may indicate a more inclusive and equitable environment, attracting and retaining contributors from various backgrounds.
Want to Know More?
Data Collection Strategies
In an open source project every individual email address that has a commit merged into the project is a "committer" (see "known issues" in the next section). Identifying the number of unique committers during a specific time period is helpful, and the formula for doing so is simple:
Number_of_committers = distinct_contributor_ids (during some period of time with a begin date and an end date). For example, I may want to know how many distinct people have committed code to a project in the past 18 months. Committers reveals the answer.
Known Issues with Data Quality
- Many contributors use more than one email, which may artificially elevate the number of total committers if these shared identities are not reconciled.
- Several committers making small, "drive by" contributions may artificially elevate this number as well.
Filters
- Time: Knowing the more recent number of distinct committers may more clearly indicate the number of people engaged in a project than examining the number over a project's (repository's) lifetime.
- Commit Size: Small commits, as measured by lines of code, could be excluded to avoid a known issue
- Commit Count: Contributors with fewer than some minimum threshold of commits in a time period could be excluded from this number.
Visualizations
Grimoire Lab showing committers
Augur maintains a table for each commit record in a repository.
To evaluate distinct committers for a repository, the following SQL, or documented API endpoints can be used:
SELECT
cmt_author_name,
COUNT ( * ) AS counter
FROM
commits
WHERE
repo_id = 22159
GROUP BY
cmt_author_name
ORDER BY
counter DESCThis expression allows an end user to filter by commit count thresholds easily, and the number of rows returned is the "Total_Committers" for the repository.
References
- Nora McDonald, Kelly Blincoe, Eva Petakovic, and Sean Goggins. 2014. Modeling Distributed Collaboration on GitHub. Advances in Complex Systems 17(7 & 8).
- Grimoire Lab
Contributors
- Sean P. Goggins
- Kevin Lumbard
- Elizabeth Barron
- Matt Germonprez
- Peculiar C. Umeh
Additional Information
To edit this metric please submit a Change Request here
To reference this metric in software or publications please use this stable URL: https://chaoss.community/?p=3945
The usage and dissemination of health metrics may lead to privacy violations. Organizations may be exposed to risks. These risks may flow from compliance with the GDPR in the EU, with state law in the US, or with other laws. There may also be contractual risks flowing from terms of service for data providers such as GitHub and GitLab. The usage of metrics must be examined for risk and potential data ethics problems. Please see CHAOSS Data Ethics document for additional guidance.