Plone Metrics Goes Online

OK, so I couldn't talk management into Naples. That means I'll miss this year's World Plone Conference. And its an important one: Plone 3.0 is the current stable release and I need to spin up on all the new capabilities.

Best I can do for the Plone community is add my voice from afar. I've been corresponding intermittantly with Paul Everitt, this year's chair of the Plone Foundation, about metrics for Plone. One idea that's gotten a little traction is a method by Richard Bullocks from, of all things, the Air War College. He starts with a desired end-state and drills down to objectives, their values, and measurable attributes. See his dissertation for the full 188-page blow-by-blow description.

For Plone, I've come up with the following.

Plone End-State	Objective	Value	Attribute
	Stable yet evolving	Software Releases	Release Size
			Release Frequency
		Software Quality	Bugs
			Core mailing lists
			Support mailing lists
			Security vulnerabilities
		Core Development Team	Size of CDT
			Involvement of CDT
		Features	New features
	Widely adopted	Acceptance	Downloads
			Installations
			Defectors
			Economic health of third-party companies
			Technical reviews
		Visibility	High-profile installations
			Users of Plone portals
			Visitors to Plone portals

In a future posting, I'll add measures, sources of these metrics, and examine some of the ways we might obtain a valid and useful measure of Plone progress towards a successful end-state. Please comment freely on what you see as strengths and weaknesses of my methodology, not to mention on Plone itself.