On 18/12/13 12:00, Richard Brown wrote:
On Wed, 2013-12-18 at 11:45 +0100, Ilias R.(Zoumpis) wrote:
These number can be easily "correlated" . For instance we can correlate the number of installations with the number of features and the bug ratio. If in 12.1 we had 100k downloads , 300 features and Bug ratio = 0.60 and in the next release the name of features increases 10 % , the number of downloads decreases 5 % but the bug ratio raises up (e.g 0.70) that should mean that people did not install/upgrade to 12.3 due to the fact that more bugs are opened than closed. More calculations and metrics can be gathered (you can have a look on Eclipse example [1]) but the point is how willing are to use these number in order to decide a possible change in the release cycle of openSUSE...
I think your logic is based on false assumptions
'Bug ratio' is a useful measure of product quality only when the number of "Bug finders" and "Bug fixers" and their productivity is roughly stable - ie. It works fine in a commercial company where these variables can be controlled and/or measured and therefore factored into your metrics.
As we're a volunteer project, that's impossible in our case. Any value in looking at the Bug Ratio is going to be lost in the variable nature of our contributors and their available time to find and/or fix bugs. Bug Ratio goes up? It's just as safe to conclude that "More people are finding bugs rather than fixing them". That does not lead to a safe conclusion that "Product is more buggy"
Features also I think is relatively meaningless, as our 'features' are often something we inherit from chosen upstream packages we've been including for a long while. The only 'valid' features I'd think are useful to the kind of analysis you propose are the sort we rarely have, original, openSUSE originated "I have a new idea for a Feature, lets do this".
I don't think an Community-driven Open Source project can be effectively modelled by numbers, and I value 'human intelligence', gut feeling, and honest feedback from real people far more than cold hard numbers.
Too much numerical navel gazing can often lead to very warped and inappropriate conclusions, we've seen a lot of them lately. I'd like to think we can move forward in a way that reflects we're a community of human beings and not a collection of numbers on a graph :)
+1000 Will -- Will Stephenson SUSE LINUX GmbH, GF: Jeff Hawn, Jennifer Guild, Felix Imendörffer, HRB 21284 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstraße 5 90409 Nürnberg Germany -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org