[Incubator] Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] 5 Star OSGeo project maturity rating

[Andrea Aime]

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 Aime
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Expert service straight from the developers.