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Option to include number of very active reviewers in report

Open MaineC opened this issue 2 years ago • 3 comments

One metric that we found helpful at $dayjob was looking at how many people there are that provide the bulk of mentorship for contributors. If that drops below a certain line (2-3 people minimum) it typically means the project is in danger.

Technically what we do is simple: Compute the number of people that provide at least $n comments over time period $x.

Is there any way to retrieve that kind of information in a/this GitHub action?

MaineC avatar Sep 11 '23 09:09 MaineC

Really interesting metric to look at for a project! Thanks for the recommendation.

I believe it is possible to pull usernames for commits/comments and the associated timestamp with the GitHub API although I imagine this would take a long time for large projects as the GitHub action would need to pull/store/analyze each comment for every issue and pr in the last x time.

We could put that into this GitHub action and if the performance impact is heavy, we could just not have the option enabled by default.

zkoppert avatar Sep 11 '23 21:09 zkoppert

One thing that just came to my mind that supports the idea to make this a non-default option:

The "are there enough people around to consider this project alive" in my experience only arises for relatively stable, quiet projects anyway - both, in InnerSource and Open Source - think " Should this project be moved to https://attic.apache.org/?" type of questions.

For larger, more busy ones I would expect the "time to first response" etc. to give a better first overview. If there is a risk for the project to fall below a sustainable number of reviewers one should see those times go up pretty quickly. For the "go up" part though one would need to run this action regularly and create a time series out of the results.

MaineC avatar Sep 13 '23 11:09 MaineC

This issue is stale because it has been open 21 days with no activity. Remove stale label or comment or this will be closed in 14 days.

github-actions[bot] avatar Mar 14 '24 01:03 github-actions[bot]