Metrics to track Open Source Projects

Question

I'm curious to know what metrics open source project members track. Small projects may not bother with tracking any numbers, but I assume that active projects would track some numbers. There are two types of metrics I'm interested in:

• Internal development metrics - e.g. from the issue tracker or other development tools.
• External metrics - number of downloads, number of visitors to project site, etc.

I would like to know if there are other useful metrics to track an OSS project.

Answer 1

Ohloh is quite nice. Another tool quite useful to get a grasp is SLOCcount.

To me, the main measure of a progress of a project is the number of commits. A project having thousands of commits is definitely something with some involvement.

Another important metric is the number of unit tests, and the number of lines of code of the tests. On average, testing code is equal to the logic code. If you have 2000 lines of code, and 1800 lines of testing, is quite ok. If you have 100 lines of testing, something is fishy.