Estimating Usage Of Open Source Projects - Flutter Telemetry Case Study - MSR' 24

This dataset (CSV) was assembled to support analysis within a case study that will be published in the proceedings of the Mining Software Repositories conference (MSR ‘24) April 14-15 2024: Estimating Usage Of Open Source Projects.

This case study explored whether publicly available metrics could serve as proxies to estimate usage of an open source project. Using the Flutter project as our case study, we collected monthly proxy metrics from GitHub, StackOverflow and Slack to compare with Flutter’s monthly active user count over the same time period: January 2018 through February 2021.

All metrics correspond to the last day of the month and/or represent aggregate activity in that month. Data from GitHub shows aggregate activity counts across the entire Flutter GitHub organization (up to 33 repositories). 

Our specific metrics include:

Tools: 

• We used an instance of GrimoireLab hosted by Bitergia to aggregate GitHub PullRequest Authors, GitHub Issue Authors, GitHub Issues, across all repositories under the Flutter Organization, and StackOverflow Question Authors, and StackOverflow Questions for questions that mention Flutter. We used the Sorting Hat of feature GrimoireLab to identify Google employees in this sample.

• GHArchive via BigQuery was used to count GitHub Star and Fork events across all repositories under the Flutter Organization

• We pulled Slack activity directly from Flutter's slack channel dashboard