How Do We Measure Project Health?

When considering a single FOSS project community, we can consider the health of the project as a whole as a proxy for how to think about sustainability. One ACM paper¹ describes health as the “project’s capability to stay viable and maintained over time without interruption or weakening.”. In the majority of FOSS cases, this also means that the community of maintainers (of whatever kind) also continues, and presumably grows to include new contributors as past ones drift away from a project.

Key Organizations / Tools Measuring Health

CHAOSS is a community project at the Linux Foundation creating models and metrics about FOSS projects’ health and more, and builds the Grimoire Lab toolset.
Bitergia is a software vendor building a number of project health tools that are also useful in FOSS.
Cauldron is a paid service that provides an analytics as-a-service platform.
Several groups have defined useful if simplistic manual checklists for project health, like VMWare and Red Hat.
The ASF has a Maturity Model for Apache Projects, where many factors are applicable for any community-led project.
The Linux Foundation Insights platform provides dashboard health metrics for their projects.
FOSS Backstage: A Strategic Approach to Assessing Viability of OSS Projects, Dawn Foster
OpenSSF Scorecard: measuring OSS project health in terms of security issues.

References & Bibliography

More research on project health is in our Zotero library.

Johan Linåker, Efi Papatheocharous, and Thomas Olsson. 2022. How to characterize the health of an Open Source Software project? A snowball literature review of an emerging practice. In The 18th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (OpenSym 2022), September 7–9, 2022, Madrid, Spain. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 12 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555051.3555067 ↩