Issue Age

Question: How long have open issues been left open?

Description

This metric is an indication of how long issues have been left open in the considered time period. If an issue has been closed but re-opened again within that period if will be considered as having remained open since its initial opening date.

Objectives

When the issue age is increasing, identify the oldest open issues in a project to gain insight as to why they have been open for an extended period of time. Additionally, to understand how well maintainers are resolving issues and how quickly issues are resolved.

Implementation

For all open issues, get the date the issue was opened and calculate the number of days to current date.

Aggregators:

• Average. Average age of all open issues.
• Median. Median age of all open issues.

Parameters:

• Period of time. Start and finish date of the period during which open issues are considered. Default: forever (i.e., the entire observable period of the project's issue activity).

Filters

• Module or working group
• Tags/labels on issue

Visualizations

1. Summary data for open issues
   

   

2. Count of open issues per day
   

   

Tools Providing the Metric

• GrimoireLab
• Augur

Data Collection Strategies

For specific descriptions of collecting data about closed issues, please refer to the corresponding section of Issues New.

References

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.