[OSGeo-Discuss] 5 Star OSGeo project maturity rating

[Cameron Shorter]

On 06/06/10 05:10, Andrea Aime wrote:
> Cameron Shorter ha scritto:
>> For the OSGeo LiveDVD and OSGeo marketing material, I propose we use 
>> a 5 star maturity rating. This is because it is too difficult to 
>> explain in a couple of words, the difference between: "Graduated", 
>> "In Incubation", "Stable", "Beta"
>> Again, I'm interested to hear comments on whether I have defined a 
>> good rating system, before we set it in stone.
>
> A rating system, imho, should take into consideration multiple vectors:
> - does the project have a long history?
> - how big is the developers community (e.g. number of active committers
>   in the last year)
> - what are the steps taken to keep the code base quality high (unit
>   tests, nightly builds, code reviews, and so on)
> - how diversified is the developer community (are all developers 
> affiliated to a single entity, or distributed among many? What is the
>   bus factor in terms of companies)
> - how live the development is (e.g., number of commits/changed files/
>   size of the diff between today and one year ago)
> - how big is the user community (e.g., nummber of subscribers to
>   the users list)
> - does it have user documentation
> - does it have developer documentation
> - does it have stable/frequent releases
> - has it been awarded OSGEO project status, is it in incubation?
>
> These  (and others) could be assigned some score, and then you could
> sum them and get to an overall score.
> Some elements could have a weight higher than others to accomodate
> for relative importance (e.g., part of OSGEO could be weighted higher
> than the other items).
>
> Just my 2 cents
>
> Cheers
> Andrea
>

Andrea,
This is a good list and looks quite similar to the OSGeo Graduation 
checklist [1]
(You have a few extra suggestions which probably should be added to the 
checklist).

I propose that 4 stars are allocated to projects that have graduated. [1]

I propose that 3 stars are allocated to projects ready to enter 
incubation, as per Project Evaluation Criteria [2]. (We may need to make 
this criteria a bit more specific in future).

Andrea and others, does this fit with people's expectations?

[1] http://www.osgeo.org/incubator/process/project_graduation_checklist.html
[2] http://www.osgeo.org/incubator/process/evaluation.html

-- 
Cameron Shorter
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