News

Project Health Indicators

Published on December 14, 2018

In the recent community survey the detection and flagging of unmaintained projects turned out as the most-often requested feature.

To give you a better overview of the maintenance status of any project from today on you can find a set of colored badges on each project that provide a visual indication of it's health based on common properties like the time since the last gem release, recent commit activity and open issue rates.

The labels are of course based on the project metrics already shown, but by automatically interpreting the plain data into colored indicators I hope to provide you with an easier indication of the health of a project without having to compare the plain values.

I chose to use one year as the limit for yellow warnings and three years for red warnings. However, this might not be fitting to all libraries. If you think an assessment is unfair or inaccurate, please add your feedback on the original PR for this feature. (You may also add your feedback if you think it is very fair and accurate of course ;)

You can also use the PR to propose additional health checks. In that regard I'd like to take the opportunity to advertise the daily database exports - browsing the actual dataset can be very helpful in identifying new health checks, and I hope we can add more of those over the next months.

The health indicators do not affect the project ranking for now since I plan to look into possible improvements of the project scoring mechanism in the next weeks anyway.

In the last two weeks I also made a lot of smaller improvements and preparations for upcoming features, most notably I refined the appeareance of categories across the site:

For more details please take a look at (and bring your feedback to) the recent pull requests, I always try to provide a good overview of the purpose of each change in the pull request description.

Best,
Christoph