The New and Improved Eclipse Project Dashboard

The Eclipse Foundation has had an activity dashboard for our open source projects for a long time. It has served us well, but it's time to move on.

The existing “classic” dashboard—implemented as part of the Dash project—is entirely custom. It was build many years ago by Eclipse Foundation staff members with very specific requirements. It was originally built for CVS, but it built with a modular architecture that made it relatively easy to extend to support SVN and then Git. However, many of the original design decisions have made leveraging the enhanced metadata available through Git challenging.

The CVS implementation was exclusively concerned with activity by official Eclipse Foundation-sanctioned committers. This was primarily due to a limitation imposed by CVS that only those individuals with write access (i.e. committers) could commit to the repository, and there was no consistent means of annotating the actual author of the code. It's still true with Git that only those individuals with write access can commit, but we do have an easy and consistent means of capturing the author.

The transition from CVS to Git was painful as it became more and more difficult to know if a commit was authored by a committer or a contributor. It became clear that the distinction wasn’t interesting from a metrics point-of-view, and over time the classic dashboard has become less and less concerned with committer activity and more and more concerned with contribution activity (which includes committers).

With the new dashboard, we're making a leveraging the hard work of others by leveraging the open source MetricsGrimoire project. MetricsGrimoire has built-in facilities to harvest information from most of our sources. It is very responsive and makes it very easy and painless to hop from one dataset to the next.

Our implementation is currently in beta; it supports all three of our existing open source software forges: Eclipse, LocationTech, and PolarSys. It provides a holistic view of project activity by tracking source code, mailing list, Bugzilla, and Gerrit activity. At some point in the future, we intend to extend it to gather metrics from the forums. Like the classic dashboard, the new dashboard is able to map activity to member companies (where appropriate) based on the employment status of the individual contributors.

We made a decision to focus source code metrics on Git exclusively, so it doesn’t gather any source code repository information for the Orbit project which still uses CVS (see Bug 349048), or any project using Subversion (which we've announced we'll be retiring at the end of 2014).

To make all this work, we leverage data from a couple of different sources. The first source of data is the Project Management Infrastructure (PMI) from which we get the association between projects and corresponding resources (source code repositories, mailing lists, Gerrit, and Bugzilla). It's very important that project teams keep this information up-to-date to ensure that the information harvested and presented by the dashboard is accurate.

Associations between individuals and activity is a bit of a moving target. Email addresses are used by Git to record the contributor information. Email addresses change over time and some people work with multiple email addresses. To consistently map commits to a particular individual, we keep track of multiple email addresses in Eclipse Foundation accounts. Individuals can provide this information themselves in their "My Account" page. Eclipse Foundation staffers can also provide this information when we notice that it's missing.

The results are impressive. From the main page, you will find overview charts of all our resources. The "subprojects" link at the top of the page lets you drill down into top-level projects and then into individual subprojects.

The new dashboard focused on the Code Recommenders project.

You can find other views (like contributions by member companies) via the menu in the top-left corner of the page. Click on the "All History" banner on the top right to open a view of the data restricted to the past five years (remember that this is in beta, we have some user interface issues to work out). You can focus in on a subset of any chart by dragging the mouse across that subset. You can click anywhere in a chart to reset to view the entire dataset.

We hope that you find the new dashboard interesting and useful. We're using Bug 405792 to track the effort; this bug is an umbrella bug, with most of the real work tracked by blocker bugs. If you’d like to bring something to the discussion, please focus your efforts there.

Enjoy!