Estimating Usage Of Open Source Projects - Flutter Telemetry Case Study - MSR' 24

<p>This dataset (CSV) was assembled to support analysis within a case study that will be published in the proceedings of the <a href="https://conf.researchr.org/home/msr-2024">Mining Software Repositories</a> conference (MSR &lsquo;24) April 14-15 2024: <a title="Estimating Usage Of Open Source Projects" href="https://doi.org/10.1145/3643991.3645066">Estimating Usage Of Open Source Projects.</a></p> <p>This case study explored whether publicly available metrics could serve as proxies to estimate usage of an open source project. Using the <a href="https://flutter.dev/">Flutter</a> project as our case study, we collected monthly proxy metrics from GitHub, StackOverflow and Slack to compare with Flutter&rsquo;s monthly active user count over the same time period: January 2018 through February 2021.</p> <p>All metrics correspond to the last day of the month and/or represent aggregate activity in that month. Data from GitHub shows aggregate activity counts across the entire <a href="https://github.com/flutter">Flutter GitHub organization</a> (up to 33 repositories).&nbsp;</p> <p>Our specific metrics include:</p> <div> <table> <tbody> <tr> <td> <p>Source</p> </td> <td> <p>Metric</p> </td> <td> <p>Aggregation method</p> </td> <td> <p>Details</p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td> <p>Flutter</p> </td> <td> <p>Monthly Active Users (MAU)</p> </td> <td> <p>Google internal tooling</p> </td> <td> <p>Flutter users active in the last 30 days, collected on the last day of each month</p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td> <p>GitHub</p> </td> <td> <p>PullRequest Authors in month</p> </td> <td> <p><a href="https://chaoss.github.io/grimoirelab/">GrimoireLab</a>, hosted by <a href="http://bitergia.com">bitergia.com</a></p> </td> <td> <p>As Google governs changes to this code base, we excluded known Google employees in code change related metrics&nbsp;</p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td> <p>GitHub</p> </td> <td> <p>Issues Created in month</p> </td> <td> <p><a href="https://chaoss.github.io/grimoirelab/">GrimoireLab</a>, hosted by <a href="http://bitergia.com">bitergia.com</a></p> </td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr> <td> <p>GitHub</p> </td> <td> <p>Issue Authors in month</p> </td> <td> <p><a href="https://chaoss.github.io/grimoirelab/">GrimoireLab</a>, hosted by <a href="http://bitergia.com">bitergia.com</a></p> </td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr> <td> <p>GitHub</p> </td> <td> <p>Fork events in month</p> </td> <td> <p><a href="http://gharchive.org">gharchive.org</a></p> </td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr> <td> <p>GitHub</p> </td> <td> <p>Fork cumulative count at the end of month</p> </td> <td> <p><a href="http://gharchive.org">gharchive.org</a></p> </td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr> <td> <p>StackOverflow</p> </td> <td> <p>Question Authors in month</p> </td> <td> <p><a href="https://chaoss.github.io/grimoirelab/">GrimoireLab</a>, hosted by <a href="http://bitergia.com">bitergia.com</a></p> </td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr> <td> <p>StackOverflow</p> </td> <td> <p>Questions in month</p> </td> <td> <p><a href="https://chaoss.github.io/grimoirelab/">GrimoireLab</a>, hosted by <a href="http://bitergia.com">bitergia.com</a></p> </td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr> <td> <p>Slack</p> </td> <td> <p>Claimed (cumulative) members at the end of the month</p> </td> <td> <p>fluttercommunity.slack</p> </td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr> <td> <p>Slack</p> </td> <td> <p>Cumulative messages at the end of the month</p> </td> <td> <p>fluttercommunity.slack</p> </td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> <p>Tools:&nbsp;</p> <ul> <li> <p>We used an instance of <a href="https://chaoss.github.io/grimoirelab/">GrimoireLab</a> hosted by <a href="https://bitergia.com/">Bitergia</a> to aggregate GitHub PullRequest Authors, GitHub Issue Authors, GitHub Issues, across all repositories under the Flutter Organization, and StackOverflow Question Authors, and StackOverflow Questions for questions that mention Flutter. We used the <a href="http://github.com/chaoss/grimoirelab-sortinghat">Sorting Hat</a> of feature GrimoireLab to identify Google employees in this sample.</p> </li> </ul> <ul> <li> <p><a href="http://gharchive.org">GHArchive</a> via <a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/public-datasets/github-on-bigquery-analyze-all-the-open-source-code">BigQuery</a> was used to count GitHub Star and Fork events across all repositories under the Flutter Organization</p> </li> <li> <p>We pulled Slack activity directly from&nbsp;<a href="http://fluttercommunity.slack.com">Flutter's slack channel </a>dashboard</p> </li> </ul>