Exosphere Sustainability Goals, Metrics, and Measurement

Overview: What does sustainability look like?

A sustainable open-source software project:

• Is responsive to changing needs of its community
• Has maintainers who set strategic direction to meet community needs, and ensure the long-term health of the project
• Has project members regularly engaged and available to respond to community requests
• Recruits new project members to compensate for attrition
• Grows existing project members toward becoming maintainers
• Maintains a secure, trustworthy open source product

Goals and Metrics

Responsiveness to Community Needs

Metric: Response time to triage and respond to new issues.

• Current: Need to measure
• Target: 90% of issues reviewed within 2 working days
• Plan to measure:
  • Choose a time period to measure (e.g. previous calendar month)
  • Look at each new issue created in that time period (e.g. https://gitlab.com/exosphere/exosphere/-/issues/?sort=created_date&state=all)
  • For each issue, note the period of time that passed between creation and application of "Triaged" label
  • Order these values
  • Take the 90th percentile value

Metric: Response time to review merge requests (code contributions).

• Current: Need to measure
• Target: 90% of merge requests reviewed within 1 working week
• Plan to measure:
  • Choose a time period to measure (e.g. previous calendar month)
  • Look at each new merge request created in that time period (e.g. https://gitlab.com/exosphere/exosphere/-/merge_requests?scope=all&sort=created_date&state=all)
  • For each merge request, note the period of time that passed between creation and response from a project maintainer
  • Order these values
  • Take the 90th percentile value

Sustainable Maintainership

Goal: Exosphere should have a sufficient number of maintainers.

Metric: Number of maintainers.

• Current: 2
• Target: 2 or more
• Plan to measure: Count the number of maintainers in https://exosphere.app/docs/governance/#maintainers

Sustainable Contributorship

Goal: Exosphere should have regular contributors covering all of the core Exosphere Contributor Skills.

Metric: Percentage of contributor skills covered by regular contributors.

• Current: 100%
• Target: 100%
• Plan to measure:
  • Choose a time period to measure (e.g. previous 6 calendar months)
  • Make a list of people who caused activity on the GitLab project
  • For each skill in the Contributor Skills table, determine whether one of more of the above contributors possess that skill
  • Take the percentage of covered skills

Project Security Posture

Metric: OpenSSF Best Practices.

• Current: 78%
• Target: 85%
• Plan to measure:
  • Review https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/en/projects/7368
  • Update any answers to the questions that may have changed recently
  • Note the new percentage of best practice coverage