Issue Response Time

Question: How much time passes between the opening of an issue and a response in the issue thread from another contributor?

Description

This metric is an indication of how much time passes between the opening of an issues and a response from other contributors.

This metric is a specific case of the Time to First Reponse metric in the Common working group.

Objectives

Learn about the responsiveness of an open source community.

Implementation

Aggregators:

• Average. Average response time in days.
• Median. Median response time in days.

Parameters:

• Period of time. Start and finish date of the period. Default: forever.
• Period during which responses are counted.

Filters

• response from role in project (e.g., first maintainer response)
• bot versus human (e.g., filter out automated “welcome first contributor messages”)
• opened by role in project (e.g., responsiveness to new contributors versus long-timers)
• date issue was opened
• status of issue (e.g., only look at currently open issues)

Visualizations

Tools Providing the Metric

• GrimoireLab: General for any ticketing system, GitHub Issues, GitLab Issues
• Augur

Data Collection Strategies

Look at the Issues New metric for a definiton of “issues.” Subtract the issue opened timestamp from the first response timestamp. Do not count responses if created by the author of the issue.

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.