[csw-maintainers] Assessing catalog quality

[Trygve Laugstøl]

On 6/26/11 12:45 AM, Maciej Bliziński wrote:
> Hello fellow maintainers,
>
> Phil has recently mentioned[1] the issue of organization-wide quality.
>   I believe it is a very important one.
>
> It would be beneficial for our project to come up with a way to track
> the quality of our catalog.  We could see trends and react when
> something bad is happening, and also see when the catalog is
> improving.  We could come up with a set of metrics that would be
> periodically applied and recorded.  With time, we would accumulate
> information about which direction is our catalog heading.
>
> We already have one metric, implemented by William: package count[2].
> It is already a useful metric, allowing us to see how the catalog
> grows in the number of packages.  It isn't a quality metric, though.
> Quality metrics will require some consideration, and we need to
> acknowledge that there will be no perfect metric to measure catalog
> quality.  However, an imperfect metric is definitely better than no
> metric.
>
> Here's my question to maintainers: What metrics would you apply to the
> catalog for the purpose of catalog quality evaluation?  Which aspects
> of packages, or interactions between packages would you take into
> consideration?  Do you have any already working code that could be
> used for this purpose?

Number of overrides is one thing that comes to mind.

-- 
Trygve