Announcing: The KDE Observatory

Hello folks,

For still unknown reasons so far I woke up a day with repetitive and indefatigable thoughts in my mind: "you should implement a plasmoid" :) That scary voice whispered in my ears - "Everybody has a plasmoid !!" - and I answered - "No, no. Which plasmoid ? I have no idea !!". Some days after, miraculous thunders falling from the sunny sky of Salvador da Bahia :) saved my soul. Your mission is:


Keeping track of statistics and metrics in software development projects is not rarely a requisite activity for early evaluation of risks, quality management, and successful delivery of functionalities. KDE community provides amazing tools for such activities: commits bots, Krazy analysis, bug tracking, review board, mailing lists, etc. Why not bring these resources together in an integrated tool ? Even better, why not all those information right on your desktop ? :) That's the KDE Observatory. The great (and sadly - and understandably - inactive) work done by Danny in KDE Commit Digest boosted me to begin that implementation two weeks ago.

The KDE Observatory is a new plasmoid for visualizing general information about KDE projects. Currently it provides four different views: Top Active Projects, Top Developers, Commit History, and Krazy Report.

Top Active Projects shows the top-n projects in terms of commit number in last m days. Presets are currently been built for main KDE projects but new projects (including yours) can already be included for Top Active Projects participation, as long as they are hosted by KDE svn.

Top Developers provides a rank with the most active developers per project, also in terms of commit number.

Commit History exhibits a chart which show how commits evolved in last y days. What about to verify how is your project going through review and bug fix phases ?

And, last but not least, my preferred one: Krazy Report. If you are all like me you hate that annoying compilation warnings and Krazy complains that say: "It's ok, but you can do better !" :) So, now there is no need for a Krazy check at www.englishbreakfastnetwork.org, all information can be found in KDE Observatory. Yes, you'll have an annoying notification in your panel soon :). Development was architected to seamless support future views, such as bugs visualization.

Now, let's proceed to some screenshots and in-depth detailing ...


The KDE Observatory

First of all, projects must be created by informing their name, commit subject prefix used in kde-commits mailing list, krazy report, krazy file identifier, and an icon.


I'm currently providing some presets for most popular KDE projects, but you are free to insert your project here and begin tracking.

In general setting you can set up parameters for the commit extent (to collect commit in the last m days), commit and Krazy synchronization delay, enable/disable automatic view change, and enable/disable a fancy sliding effect when changing views. Also on that configuration page, you are able to enable/disable a specific view type and define the appearance order.


In the Views page you select the desired projects to be processed in a per-view basis, so that you can display a Krazy Report for KDevelop but not for Plasma, for example.


So, let's appreciate some results:

Top Active Projects: ... and the rank is: KDE Localization, KDE Review, Akonadi, KStars, and Plasma. Congratulations to KDE Localization Team ... iééé :)


Top Developers in each considered project:









Congratulations to Chusslove, Sebastian, Tobias, Alexey, and Aaron :)

Commit History for each considered project:






Krazy Reports: the amazing code checker at your desktop :)




So, that's all, suggestions are welcome as usual. Feel free to give it a try.

See you ...