> And to nobody's surprise, we are suffering with PRs. Glad to see the data goes back to 2011… what I see is we float around .6 to .8 for "Change Request Closure Ratio (GitHub PR)”… and AI didn’t change anything here? At least looking at the last 2 years as a proxy, this metric doesn’t really look any different from between 2020 to now.
"Open PR backlog (total)” also reenforces this. The other projects (Kafka, Spark, Flink, and DataFusion) all have a clear hockey stick pattern starting 2024 but Cassandra doesn’t; the pattern is linear growth… What is more telling is "Contributor Absence Factor”, Cassandra is at 7 which is basically unchanged since 2015. And from 2022 Kafka has gone from ~8 to 25... > On Oct 13, 2026, at 11:07 AM, Patrick McFadin <[email protected]> wrote: > > Thanks for the feedback I got so far. As a result of one of those discussions > I added every sub-project to the project health page. You can now select > which project to look at and it will give you a similar page of stats for > Cassandra or each sub-project. > > Patrick > >> On Oct 10, 2026, at 11:10 PM, Patrick McFadin <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Hello from sunny and warm Glasgow and Community Over Code. >> >> A series of things lately, have me asking questions about how our community >> is doing, how the project is doing and is this something special to the >> Cassandra project? Not an easy thing to measure so I decided to find out if >> it was possible. >> >> The answer is yes! Linux Foundation already does a health status page for >> their projects, with lots of metrics and with an entire subproject called >> CHAOSS[1] This lead me to develop this first version of our project health >> geared towards apache projects: >> >> https://pmcfadin.github.io/cassandra-project-health/index.html >> >> There are a lot of metrics, but they are grouped into, >> Community: Code and contributor health metrics >> Governance: How each commit stands up to our standards of testing and >> review >> Conversations: Sentiment analysis across every email in dev@ and every JIRA >> comment >> Peers: Select group of metrics form other projects as a comparison >> >> A couple things stand out very quickly. We are very responsive on mailing >> lists and great with new people. And to nobody's surprise, we are suffering >> with PRs. >> >> That lead me to another path. In teams I work with, automated review >> pipelines are getting really deep with AI assitance and it's needed. There >> is a lot of toil just opening a PR to look at and start a review process. >> I've polled collegues, used existing skills like the rustrazorblade >> skills[2] and practices I've seen from my own work. >> >> https://pmcfadin.github.io/cassandra-pr-review/ >> >> This is a limited group of PRs I did a a POC but ideally, this would be run >> as soon as a new PR is recived and the contributor would get a report link >> within minutes. I also did not every single script in my pipeline for every >> PR. A good example of every script being run is PR 5021: >> >> https://pmcfadin.github.io/cassandra-pr-review/pr/5201/ >> >> Some highlights of what it does. >> Check to make sure all elements are present. Tests. Reviewer. CI results. >> Looking at the code changes and suggesting reviewers >> Adversarial code review output >> Static analysis using PMD >> A test plan for if you want to do deeper testing using Easy DB Lab >> A lot lot more... >> >> For new contributors, this gives them immediate feedback and gives them a >> self-service aspect. You can run all these locally as well. >> For reviewers, you can get a quick glance of the current state of the PR >> with low effort >> >> Both of these projects are available as public repos and would love to hear >> your feedback. What's missing? What could be better? Jarek Potiuk and I had >> a discussion about maybe folding this into Apache Magpie. What do you think? >> https://github.com/pmcfadin/cassandra-pr-review >> https://github.com/pmcfadin/cassandra-project-health >> >> Patrick >> >> 1. https://www.chaoss.community/kb/metrics-model-starter-project-health/ >> 2. https://github.com/rustyrazorblade/skills
