LFX for Governing Boards
We recently started presenting LFX to a few Governing Boards and have created this post to share some of the key capabilities of LFX that resonate with them. We would also like to encourage Executive Directors and GMs, to share with your respective Governing Boards…
Let’s start with the role of Governing Boards. They provide oversight of the fiduciary and strategic elements in a given foundation with the responsibility of enabling a healthy project and thriving community for each project hosted. Additionally, Governing Board representatives individually often have a responsibility to their organizations to demonstrate the value they are receiving from their participation in open source projects.
LFX tools help to validate a project’s ROI for members, and the LFX dashboards and metrics are pivotal in monitoring and analyzing the growth and health of a project throughout its lifecycle.
In this is Part I of a three part series we cover key capabilities in Insights, followed by Organization Dashboard and Security to assist your governing boards members in exploring important information for a given project.
Part I: Insights
Insights help our Governing Boards stay on top of all the critical aspects of a project.
1. Project Trends dashboards provide analytics of project performance data and are grouped into different blocks of metrics.
Using Project Trends dashboards, Governing Boards can easily assess project health and sustainability. Monitoring Contributor Growth over time will show the rate of the return on their investment. For example, if a project has consistent contributor growth, it generally means that the organization is receiving a high return on their organization’s investment.
Metrics to look at:
Is your project attracting enough contributors and is the project properly resourced?
- Is the project striking the right balance of contributor growth and retention of the project over time?
2. Project Commits Metrics - Monitor the total number of commits of the project during a given time period (3 mos, 6 mos, 1-2-3-5 yrs).
- Does the growth in commits align with the project commitments and release schedules?
3. New Contributor Growth and Contribution Metrics- Bar graphs that display the total number of new contributors joining the projects during the selected time range, and represents a periodic growth or decline in the count of new contributors during the selected time range.
Does this project consistently attract new developers and is the community attracting enough new developers to support the goals?
4. LOC Added And Deleted: Shows periodic graphs that display the number of the total lines of code added and deleted for each unique commit during the selected time range.
- How does this compare to YoY?
5. Code Pipeline- This is a great way to look at the project efficiencies and shows the total count of unique commits (pull requests or changesets) submitted, reviewed, approved, and merged across all projects during the selected time range.
Ex: Questions you may want to ask:
- Is our tooling keeping up with the code demands?
- Are there any points of improvement needed to be done during a specific cycle in our CI?
6. Source Code Commit Contributions
Gives Governing Boards access to the top contributors of a project and top organizations for code commits, pull requests, issue resolution, and CI/CD pipelines over selected time ranges.
Ex: Check the projects Top 10 Organizations By Commit 5 years ago and compare to 2021. Is the project becoming more diverse? If the color blocks shrink this is a good indication that contributions are diversified in this project.
** For additional information on Insights, check out these videos: