Research questions

This page lists questions and research areas that may help with directing this group's efforts.

Distribution of open-source projects repository hosting

Knowing these numbers will tell us where to look and where it is not worth looking.

• GitHub
• GitLab
• SourceForge (still has some ecellent projects there)
• Apache Foundation (have they all moved to GitHub by now?)
• Self-hosted (e.g. Postgres)
• Other

Project size to docs size

Correlating project metrics to documentation metrics may help us assess documentation maturity levels and their ditribution.

Project metrics:

• number of files
• total size in lines of code
• total size of code in bytes
• number of contributors
• contributor per country
• number of forks, stars, downloads
• number of commits
• amount of comments in the code
• NPM, NuGet, RubyGems and other distribution numbers

Documentation metrics:

• number of documents
• document format (e.g. .md, .txt, .rst)
• file names
• number of commits to doc files
• correlation of code commits to docs commits or a time series for both
• number of contributors to doc files and their country
• size of doc files in lines
• size of doc files in bytes
• number of images
• code examples (.md files only?)
• grammar score
• translations

ReadMe analysis

Since ReadMe files are so ubiquitous it may be helpful to take a deeper look at their structure and contents.

• Common headings / sections
• Relation to other docs in the project
• Basic linguistic analysis, e.g. corpus of words