To the Koha development community, I am in the process of writing a news story about the recent grant from EBSCO Information Services to support some major development initiatives for Koha. This seems to be an important opportunity for the Koha community to accelerate development that might have otherwise taken longer to accomplish. As part of the context for this article, and for other reports and presentations that I make that include Koha, I would like to be able to provide a quantitative measure of the total amount of personnel resources contributed globally towards the development of Koha. I understand that several firms dedicate specific amounts of personnel to Koha development and that there are dozens of individuals that make commits to the code, write documentation, or perform quality assurance. I would appreciate it members of this list would help me compile a current figure on the number of FTE involved in Koha development. To end up with a consistent quantifiable measure, the following definitions would apply: 1 FTE (full time equivalent) = 1 person working full time for 1 year. Full time = 40 hours per week 50 weeks/year. An individual that contributes 20 hours per week on Koha for the whole year= (20 hours per week * 50 weeks per year) / 2000 hours per year = .5 FTE An individual that contributes 20 hours total for the year: (20 / 2000) * 100 = 0.01 FTE Could each of the support firms or individuals involved in Koha development please either post to this list or send to me individually the FTE that you or your organization contributes for each of the major categories of activity? For example: Company XYZ: 5 FTE development, 1 FTE Documentation, 1.5 FTE Quality Assurance. Alternatively, the number of hours per year contributed could be given instead of FTE and I'll perform the calculations. If there is a better way to quantify the resources devoted to Koha, I would be interested in your suggestions. I believe that documenting the development resources involved in Koha will help those outside the community have a better understanding of Koha's potential to continue to be enhanced to meet the needs of libraries. I need to get this article to the publisher (ALA TechSource) in the next day or two, it would be great to hear from you soon. Thanks very much for your help with this request. -marshall Marshall Breeding marshall.breeding@librarytechnology.org<mailto:marshall.breeding@librarytechnology.org> www.librarytechnology.org/<http://www.librarytechnology.org/> twitter.com/mbreeding http://www.linkedin.com/in/breeding http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=NnvfJ5cAAAAJ
Marshall, I don't think we can provide you with that information in that time frame. We could try, but not sure. On the other hand, have you seen the project's profile on OpenHub? [1]. It provides lots of metrics about the projects activity, even developer-wise. You could take a look and see if it helps. One thing that might be missing is the mapping <individual> -> <company/institution>. We could help with that. [1] https://www.openhub.net/p/koha On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 11:07 AM, Marshall Breeding < marshall.breeding@librarytechnology.org> wrote:
To the Koha development community,
I am in the process of writing a news story about the recent grant from EBSCO Information Services to support some major development initiatives for Koha. This seems to be an important opportunity for the Koha community to accelerate development that might have otherwise taken longer to accomplish.
As part of the context for this article, and for other reports and presentations that I make that include Koha, I would like to be able to provide a quantitative measure of the total amount of personnel resources contributed globally towards the development of Koha. I understand that several firms dedicate specific amounts of personnel to Koha development and that there are dozens of individuals that make commits to the code, write documentation, or perform quality assurance.
I would appreciate it members of this list would help me compile a current figure on the number of FTE involved in Koha development.
To end up with a consistent quantifiable measure, the following definitions would apply:
1 FTE (full time equivalent) = 1 person working full time for 1 year.
Full time = 40 hours per week 50 weeks/year.
An individual that contributes 20 hours per week on Koha for the whole year=
(20 hours per week * 50 weeks per year) / 2000 hours per year = .5 FTE
An individual that contributes 20 hours total for the year:
(20 / 2000) * 100 = 0.01 FTE
Could each of the support firms or individuals involved in Koha development please either post to this list or send to me individually the FTE that you or your organization contributes for each of the major categories of activity?
For example:
Company XYZ: 5 FTE development, 1 FTE Documentation, 1.5 FTE Quality Assurance.
Alternatively, the number of hours per year contributed could be given instead of FTE and I’ll perform the calculations.
If there is a better way to quantify the resources devoted to Koha, I would be interested in your suggestions.
I believe that documenting the development resources involved in Koha will help those outside the community have a better understanding of Koha’s potential to continue to be enhanced to meet the needs of libraries.
I need to get this article to the publisher (ALA TechSource) in the next day or two, it would be great to hear from you soon.
Thanks very much for your help with this request.
-marshall
Marshall Breeding
marshall.breeding@librarytechnology.org
www.librarytechnology.org/
twitter.com/mbreeding
http://www.linkedin.com/in/breeding
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=NnvfJ5cAAAAJ
_______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list Koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org http://lists.koha-community.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel website : http://www.koha-community.org/ git : http://git.koha-community.org/ bugs : http://bugs.koha-community.org/
-- Tomás Cohen Arazi Prosecretaría de Informática Universidad Nacional de Córdoba ✆ +54 351 5353750 ext 13168 GPG: B76C 6E7C 2D80 551A C765 E225 0A27 2EA1 B2F3 C15F
Thomas, Even if it takes longer to compile, this information would be very useful. Maybe you could provide a rough estimate at first, that could be refined with more time. I have looked at the open hub numbers previously. Thanks for the reminder to reference it. -marshall From: Tomas Cohen Arazi [mailto:tomascohen@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2015 8:49 AM To: Marshall Breeding Cc: koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org; Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz (koha@lists.katipo.co.nz) Subject: Re: [Koha-devel] Koha development Marshall, I don't think we can provide you with that information in that time frame. We could try, but not sure. On the other hand, have you seen the project's profile on OpenHub? [1]. It provides lots of metrics about the projects activity, even developer-wise. You could take a look and see if it helps. One thing that might be missing is the mapping <individual> -> <company/institution>. We could help with that. [1] https://www.openhub.net/p/koha On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 11:07 AM, Marshall Breeding <marshall.breeding@librarytechnology.org<mailto:marshall.breeding@librarytechnology.org>> wrote: To the Koha development community, I am in the process of writing a news story about the recent grant from EBSCO Information Services to support some major development initiatives for Koha. This seems to be an important opportunity for the Koha community to accelerate development that might have otherwise taken longer to accomplish. As part of the context for this article, and for other reports and presentations that I make that include Koha, I would like to be able to provide a quantitative measure of the total amount of personnel resources contributed globally towards the development of Koha. I understand that several firms dedicate specific amounts of personnel to Koha development and that there are dozens of individuals that make commits to the code, write documentation, or perform quality assurance. I would appreciate it members of this list would help me compile a current figure on the number of FTE involved in Koha development. To end up with a consistent quantifiable measure, the following definitions would apply: 1 FTE (full time equivalent) = 1 person working full time for 1 year. Full time = 40 hours per week 50 weeks/year. An individual that contributes 20 hours per week on Koha for the whole year= (20 hours per week * 50 weeks per year) / 2000 hours per year = .5 FTE An individual that contributes 20 hours total for the year: (20 / 2000) * 100 = 0.01 FTE Could each of the support firms or individuals involved in Koha development please either post to this list or send to me individually the FTE that you or your organization contributes for each of the major categories of activity? For example: Company XYZ: 5 FTE development, 1 FTE Documentation, 1.5 FTE Quality Assurance. Alternatively, the number of hours per year contributed could be given instead of FTE and I’ll perform the calculations. If there is a better way to quantify the resources devoted to Koha, I would be interested in your suggestions. I believe that documenting the development resources involved in Koha will help those outside the community have a better understanding of Koha’s potential to continue to be enhanced to meet the needs of libraries. I need to get this article to the publisher (ALA TechSource) in the next day or two, it would be great to hear from you soon. Thanks very much for your help with this request. -marshall Marshall Breeding marshall.breeding@librarytechnology.org<mailto:marshall.breeding@librarytechnology.org> www.librarytechnology.org/<http://www.librarytechnology.org/> twitter.com/mbreeding<http://twitter.com/mbreeding> http://www.linkedin.com/in/breeding http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=NnvfJ5cAAAAJ _______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list Koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org<mailto:Koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org> http://lists.koha-community.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel website : http://www.koha-community.org/ git : http://git.koha-community.org/ bugs : http://bugs.koha-community.org/ -- Tomás Cohen Arazi Prosecretaría de Informática Universidad Nacional de Córdoba ✆ +54 351 5353750 ext 13168 GPG: B76C 6E7C 2D80 551A C765 E225 0A27 2EA1 B2F3 C15F
Le 12/02/2015 15:07, Marshall Breeding a écrit :
To the Koha development community, Hi Marshall, Could each of the support firms or individuals involved in Koha development please either post to this list or send to me individually the FTE that you or your organization contributes for each of the major categories of activity?
Really : it's impossible to evaluate properly. some numbers can be evaluated, some can't. For example, BibLibre : * has Jonathan working full time on Koha. Half time dedicated to the community, half time dedicated to development sponsored by customers (but still on Koha, and for a direct benefit of the Koha community). So, OK, jonathan = 1 FTE * has Fridolin being Release Maintainer. He releases a version every month (4 hours to package it, roughly), plus a variable number of hours to push patches (between 1 and 10 ? it depends on what is waiting to be pushed. Let's say an average of 5 hours). 1 version every month, 9 hours per version = 9*12 = 118 (this number is wrong, it's an estimate) * has a support team of 3 (including fridolin), that regularly submit bugfixes. Frankly, we don't count the specific time dedicated to fixing a bug and submitting a patch vs the time dedicated to the customer. * has other developers regularly submitting patches (julian, matthias, ...) * has me ... who does not submit patches anymore, but I'm trying to organize all the work at BibLibre, do some non-dev things for the community. Should I count this ? I think yes, because (I hope), the project also move through non technical work. * has all our staff participate to the hackfest in Europe, 1 full week in march = 17*40 ? * has 2 or more ppl going to the KohaCon every year. Overall, I really really can't calculate the involvment of BibLibre as you ask, I'm sorry. Maybe saying 3 FTE is a rough-not-illogic estimate, but it's an estimate ! HTH -- Paul Poulain, Associé-gérant / co-owner BibLibre, expert du logiciel libre pour les bibliothèques BibLibre, Open Source software for libraries expert
Paul, This estimate helps quite a bit. Part of what I'm working toward is being able to have a figure for Koha that corresponds to what the vendors developing proprietary products allocate to product development. They also have lots of staff devoted to things like marketing and administration, but the point of comparison is the FTE allocated to development. My hypothesis is that the overall development allocation for Koha is similar to that for proprietary ILS products and I hope to be able to document that to some degree. -marshall -----Original Message----- From: koha-devel-bounces@lists.koha-community.org [mailto:koha-devel-bounces@lists.koha-community.org] On Behalf Of Paul Poulain Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2015 11:03 AM To: koha@lists.katipo.co.nz; koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org Subject: Re: [Koha-devel] [Koha] Koha development Le 12/02/2015 15:07, Marshall Breeding a écrit :
To the Koha development community, Hi Marshall, Could each of the support firms or individuals involved in Koha development please either post to this list or send to me individually the FTE that you or your organization contributes for each of the major categories of activity?
Really : it's impossible to evaluate properly. some numbers can be evaluated, some can't. For example, BibLibre : * has Jonathan working full time on Koha. Half time dedicated to the community, half time dedicated to development sponsored by customers (but still on Koha, and for a direct benefit of the Koha community). So, OK, jonathan = 1 FTE * has Fridolin being Release Maintainer. He releases a version every month (4 hours to package it, roughly), plus a variable number of hours to push patches (between 1 and 10 ? it depends on what is waiting to be pushed. Let's say an average of 5 hours). 1 version every month, 9 hours per version = 9*12 = 118 (this number is wrong, it's an estimate) * has a support team of 3 (including fridolin), that regularly submit bugfixes. Frankly, we don't count the specific time dedicated to fixing a bug and submitting a patch vs the time dedicated to the customer. * has other developers regularly submitting patches (julian, matthias, ...) * has me ... who does not submit patches anymore, but I'm trying to organize all the work at BibLibre, do some non-dev things for the community. Should I count this ? I think yes, because (I hope), the project also move through non technical work. * has all our staff participate to the hackfest in Europe, 1 full week in march = 17*40 ? * has 2 or more ppl going to the KohaCon every year. Overall, I really really can't calculate the involvment of BibLibre as you ask, I'm sorry. Maybe saying 3 FTE is a rough-not-illogic estimate, but it's an estimate ! HTH -- Paul Poulain, Associé-gérant / co-owner BibLibre, expert du logiciel libre pour les bibliothèques BibLibre, Open Source software for libraries expert _______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list Koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org http://lists.koha-community.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel website : http://www.koha-community.org/ git : http://git.koha-community.org/ bugs : http://bugs.koha-community.org/
I'm not sure how to count it either. This would be my estimate. I spend 50% of my time doing Release Manager duties, the rest is spent working on development and documentation. But if I count the amount of hours I work for Koha, I should count a total of 1.3 FTE, I guess. If I count Bernardo, it'd be something like: Universidad Nacional de Cordoba (Tomas + Bernardo) Quality Assurance: 0.6 FTE + 0,1 FTE = 0.6 FTE Development: 0.5 FTE + 0.1 FTE = 0.6 FTE Documentation: 0.2 FTE Community participation is difficult to count. I'm interested on the numbers you can collect. My hypothesis would be that more development allocation is available than most proprietary ILS products. Of course it fluctuates every year, but the OpenHub numbers speak of themselves 88 contributors for 2014. Unfortunately I cannot find a way to get the COCOMO-model invested working hours. Good luck, Marshall! On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 2:17 PM, Marshall Breeding < marshall.breeding@librarytechnology.org> wrote:
Paul,
This estimate helps quite a bit. Part of what I'm working toward is being able to have a figure for Koha that corresponds to what the vendors developing proprietary products allocate to product development. They also have lots of staff devoted to things like marketing and administration, but the point of comparison is the FTE allocated to development. My hypothesis is that the overall development allocation for Koha is similar to that for proprietary ILS products and I hope to be able to document that to some degree.
-marshall
-----Original Message----- From: koha-devel-bounces@lists.koha-community.org [mailto: koha-devel-bounces@lists.koha-community.org] On Behalf Of Paul Poulain Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2015 11:03 AM To: koha@lists.katipo.co.nz; koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org Subject: Re: [Koha-devel] [Koha] Koha development
Le 12/02/2015 15:07, Marshall Breeding a écrit :
To the Koha development community, Hi Marshall, Could each of the support firms or individuals involved in Koha development please either post to this list or send to me individually the FTE that you or your organization contributes for each of the major categories of activity?
Really : it's impossible to evaluate properly. some numbers can be evaluated, some can't.
For example, BibLibre : * has Jonathan working full time on Koha. Half time dedicated to the community, half time dedicated to development sponsored by customers (but still on Koha, and for a direct benefit of the Koha community). So, OK, jonathan = 1 FTE * has Fridolin being Release Maintainer. He releases a version every month (4 hours to package it, roughly), plus a variable number of hours to push patches (between 1 and 10 ? it depends on what is waiting to be pushed. Let's say an average of 5 hours). 1 version every month, 9 hours per version = 9*12 = 118 (this number is wrong, it's an estimate) * has a support team of 3 (including fridolin), that regularly submit bugfixes. Frankly, we don't count the specific time dedicated to fixing a bug and submitting a patch vs the time dedicated to the customer. * has other developers regularly submitting patches (julian, matthias, ...) * has me ... who does not submit patches anymore, but I'm trying to organize all the work at BibLibre, do some non-dev things for the community. Should I count this ? I think yes, because (I hope), the project also move through non technical work. * has all our staff participate to the hackfest in Europe, 1 full week in march = 17*40 ? * has 2 or more ppl going to the KohaCon every year.
Overall, I really really can't calculate the involvment of BibLibre as you ask, I'm sorry. Maybe saying 3 FTE is a rough-not-illogic estimate, but it's an estimate !
HTH
-- Paul Poulain, Associé-gérant / co-owner BibLibre, expert du logiciel libre pour les bibliothèques BibLibre, Open Source software for libraries expert
_______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list Koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org http://lists.koha-community.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel website : http://www.koha-community.org/ git : http://git.koha-community.org/ bugs : http://bugs.koha-community.org/ _______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list Koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org http://lists.koha-community.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel website : http://www.koha-community.org/ git : http://git.koha-community.org/ bugs : http://bugs.koha-community.org/
-- Tomás Cohen Arazi Prosecretaría de Informática Universidad Nacional de Córdoba ✆ +54 351 5353750 ext 13168 GPG: B76C 6E7C 2D80 551A C765 E225 0A27 2EA1 B2F3 C15F
I would be much happier using the numbers that Tomás pointed out (which is a much different story then FTE). Marshall could you maybe ask these proprietary companies to match our numbers, instead of the other way around - then you'd get a much better idea of what's actually happening. For example, we have about 3000 patches submitted a year from close to 100 different authors. Let's just say that it's 6 hours average to write and submit the patches (so we are at 18,000 hours there), then it's 3 hours average to sign off the patches (9,000 hrs), then 3 hours average to QA the patches (another 9,000 hrs). Thats 9 FTE right there (and that's being generous with my averaging - also those FTE aren't checking facebook etc ;) ) And that is only a small portion of the whole picture, I haven't even gotten into the RMs or RMaints responsibilities or anything that goes with packaging the release, then we've got all the documentation people too. OR even the amount of time to manage such large amounts of code (which I'm sure the proprietaries are counting in their results). Please anyone adjust my numbers above and I'm only just really guessing and the amount of time to write the patches in the first place should could needs to be doubled to 12 hours on average. Just some food for thought. Also we'd be interested in what the blackbox/closed systems are reporting for your question? On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 9:31 AM, Tomas Cohen Arazi <tomascohen@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm not sure how to count it either. This would be my estimate.
I spend 50% of my time doing Release Manager duties, the rest is spent working on development and documentation. But if I count the amount of hours I work for Koha, I should count a total of 1.3 FTE, I guess. If I count Bernardo, it'd be something like:
Universidad Nacional de Cordoba (Tomas + Bernardo) Quality Assurance: 0.6 FTE + 0,1 FTE = 0.6 FTE Development: 0.5 FTE + 0.1 FTE = 0.6 FTE Documentation: 0.2 FTE
Community participation is difficult to count.
I'm interested on the numbers you can collect. My hypothesis would be that more development allocation is available than most proprietary ILS products. Of course it fluctuates every year, but the OpenHub numbers speak of themselves 88 contributors for 2014. Unfortunately I cannot find a way to get the COCOMO-model invested working hours.
Good luck, Marshall!
On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 2:17 PM, Marshall Breeding < marshall.breeding@librarytechnology.org> wrote:
Paul,
This estimate helps quite a bit. Part of what I'm working toward is being able to have a figure for Koha that corresponds to what the vendors developing proprietary products allocate to product development. They also have lots of staff devoted to things like marketing and administration, but the point of comparison is the FTE allocated to development. My hypothesis is that the overall development allocation for Koha is similar to that for proprietary ILS products and I hope to be able to document that to some degree.
-marshall
-----Original Message----- From: koha-devel-bounces@lists.koha-community.org [mailto: koha-devel-bounces@lists.koha-community.org] On Behalf Of Paul Poulain Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2015 11:03 AM To: koha@lists.katipo.co.nz; koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org Subject: Re: [Koha-devel] [Koha] Koha development
Le 12/02/2015 15:07, Marshall Breeding a écrit :
To the Koha development community, Hi Marshall, Could each of the support firms or individuals involved in Koha development please either post to this list or send to me individually the FTE that you or your organization contributes for each of the major categories of activity?
Really : it's impossible to evaluate properly. some numbers can be evaluated, some can't.
For example, BibLibre : * has Jonathan working full time on Koha. Half time dedicated to the community, half time dedicated to development sponsored by customers (but still on Koha, and for a direct benefit of the Koha community). So, OK, jonathan = 1 FTE * has Fridolin being Release Maintainer. He releases a version every month (4 hours to package it, roughly), plus a variable number of hours to push patches (between 1 and 10 ? it depends on what is waiting to be pushed. Let's say an average of 5 hours). 1 version every month, 9 hours per version = 9*12 = 118 (this number is wrong, it's an estimate) * has a support team of 3 (including fridolin), that regularly submit bugfixes. Frankly, we don't count the specific time dedicated to fixing a bug and submitting a patch vs the time dedicated to the customer. * has other developers regularly submitting patches (julian, matthias, ...) * has me ... who does not submit patches anymore, but I'm trying to organize all the work at BibLibre, do some non-dev things for the community. Should I count this ? I think yes, because (I hope), the project also move through non technical work. * has all our staff participate to the hackfest in Europe, 1 full week in march = 17*40 ? * has 2 or more ppl going to the KohaCon every year.
Overall, I really really can't calculate the involvment of BibLibre as you ask, I'm sorry. Maybe saying 3 FTE is a rough-not-illogic estimate, but it's an estimate !
HTH
-- Paul Poulain, Associé-gérant / co-owner BibLibre, expert du logiciel libre pour les bibliothèques BibLibre, Open Source software for libraries expert
_______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list Koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org http://lists.koha-community.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel website : http://www.koha-community.org/ git : http://git.koha-community.org/ bugs : http://bugs.koha-community.org/ _______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list Koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org http://lists.koha-community.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel website : http://www.koha-community.org/ git : http://git.koha-community.org/ bugs : http://bugs.koha-community.org/
-- Tomás Cohen Arazi Prosecretaría de Informática Universidad Nacional de Córdoba ✆ +54 351 5353750 ext 13168 GPG: B76C 6E7C 2D80 551A C765 E225 0A27 2EA1 B2F3 C15F
_______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list Koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org http://lists.koha-community.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel website : http://www.koha-community.org/ git : http://git.koha-community.org/ bugs : http://bugs.koha-community.org/
-- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Brendan A. Gallagher ByWater Solutions CEO Support and Consulting for Open Source Software Installation, Data Migration, Training, Customization, Hosting and Complete Support Packages Headquarters: Santa Barbara, CA - Office: Redding, CT Phone # (888) 900-8944 http://bywatersolutions.com info@bywatersolutions.com
Brendan, Some personnel FTE numbers from last year can be seen on the tables from the Library Systems Report: http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/sites/americanlibrariesmagazine.org... The numbers are for the company overall, and not limited to efforts expended on specific products or projects. -marshall From: Brendan Gallagher [mailto:info@bywatersolutions.com] Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2015 3:04 PM To: Tomas Cohen Arazi Cc: Marshall Breeding; koha@lists.katipo.co.nz; koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org Subject: Re: [Koha-devel] [Koha] Koha development I would be much happier using the numbers that Tomás pointed out (which is a much different story then FTE). Marshall could you maybe ask these proprietary companies to match our numbers, instead of the other way around - then you'd get a much better idea of what's actually happening. For example, we have about 3000 patches submitted a year from close to 100 different authors. Let's just say that it's 6 hours average to write and submit the patches (so we are at 18,000 hours there), then it's 3 hours average to sign off the patches (9,000 hrs), then 3 hours average to QA the patches (another 9,000 hrs). Thats 9 FTE right there (and that's being generous with my averaging - also those FTE aren't checking facebook etc ;) ) And that is only a small portion of the whole picture, I haven't even gotten into the RMs or RMaints responsibilities or anything that goes with packaging the release, then we've got all the documentation people too. OR even the amount of time to manage such large amounts of code (which I'm sure the proprietaries are counting in their results). Please anyone adjust my numbers above and I'm only just really guessing and the amount of time to write the patches in the first place should could needs to be doubled to 12 hours on average. Just some food for thought. Also we'd be interested in what the blackbox/closed systems are reporting for your question? On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 9:31 AM, Tomas Cohen Arazi <tomascohen@gmail.com<mailto:tomascohen@gmail.com>> wrote: I'm not sure how to count it either. This would be my estimate. I spend 50% of my time doing Release Manager duties, the rest is spent working on development and documentation. But if I count the amount of hours I work for Koha, I should count a total of 1.3 FTE, I guess. If I count Bernardo, it'd be something like: Universidad Nacional de Cordoba (Tomas + Bernardo) Quality Assurance: 0.6 FTE + 0,1 FTE = 0.6 FTE Development: 0.5 FTE + 0.1 FTE = 0.6 FTE Documentation: 0.2 FTE Community participation is difficult to count. I'm interested on the numbers you can collect. My hypothesis would be that more development allocation is available than most proprietary ILS products. Of course it fluctuates every year, but the OpenHub numbers speak of themselves 88 contributors for 2014. Unfortunately I cannot find a way to get the COCOMO-model invested working hours. Good luck, Marshall! On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 2:17 PM, Marshall Breeding <marshall.breeding@librarytechnology.org<mailto:marshall.breeding@librarytechnology.org>> wrote: Paul, This estimate helps quite a bit. Part of what I'm working toward is being able to have a figure for Koha that corresponds to what the vendors developing proprietary products allocate to product development. They also have lots of staff devoted to things like marketing and administration, but the point of comparison is the FTE allocated to development. My hypothesis is that the overall development allocation for Koha is similar to that for proprietary ILS products and I hope to be able to document that to some degree. -marshall -----Original Message----- From: koha-devel-bounces@lists.koha-community.org<mailto:koha-devel-bounces@lists.koha-community.org> [mailto:koha-devel-bounces@lists.koha-community.org<mailto:koha-devel-bounces@lists.koha-community.org>] On Behalf Of Paul Poulain Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2015 11:03 AM To: koha@lists.katipo.co.nz<mailto:koha@lists.katipo.co.nz>; koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org<mailto:koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org> Subject: Re: [Koha-devel] [Koha] Koha development Le 12/02/2015 15:07, Marshall Breeding a écrit :
To the Koha development community, Hi Marshall, Could each of the support firms or individuals involved in Koha development please either post to this list or send to me individually the FTE that you or your organization contributes for each of the major categories of activity?
Really : it's impossible to evaluate properly. some numbers can be evaluated, some can't. For example, BibLibre : * has Jonathan working full time on Koha. Half time dedicated to the community, half time dedicated to development sponsored by customers (but still on Koha, and for a direct benefit of the Koha community). So, OK, jonathan = 1 FTE * has Fridolin being Release Maintainer. He releases a version every month (4 hours to package it, roughly), plus a variable number of hours to push patches (between 1 and 10 ? it depends on what is waiting to be pushed. Let's say an average of 5 hours). 1 version every month, 9 hours per version = 9*12 = 118 (this number is wrong, it's an estimate) * has a support team of 3 (including fridolin), that regularly submit bugfixes. Frankly, we don't count the specific time dedicated to fixing a bug and submitting a patch vs the time dedicated to the customer. * has other developers regularly submitting patches (julian, matthias, ...) * has me ... who does not submit patches anymore, but I'm trying to organize all the work at BibLibre, do some non-dev things for the community. Should I count this ? I think yes, because (I hope), the project also move through non technical work. * has all our staff participate to the hackfest in Europe, 1 full week in march = 17*40 ? * has 2 or more ppl going to the KohaCon every year. Overall, I really really can't calculate the involvment of BibLibre as you ask, I'm sorry. Maybe saying 3 FTE is a rough-not-illogic estimate, but it's an estimate ! HTH -- Paul Poulain, Associé-gérant / co-owner BibLibre, expert du logiciel libre pour les bibliothèques BibLibre, Open Source software for libraries expert _______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list Koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org<mailto:Koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org> http://lists.koha-community.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel website : http://www.koha-community.org/ git : http://git.koha-community.org/ bugs : http://bugs.koha-community.org/ _______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list Koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org<mailto:Koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org> http://lists.koha-community.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel website : http://www.koha-community.org/ git : http://git.koha-community.org/ bugs : http://bugs.koha-community.org/ -- Tomás Cohen Arazi Prosecretaría de Informática Universidad Nacional de Córdoba ✆ +54 351 5353750 ext 13168<tel:%2B54%20351%205353750%20ext%2013168> GPG: B76C 6E7C 2D80 551A C765 E225 0A27 2EA1 B2F3 C15F _______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list Koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org<mailto:Koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org> http://lists.koha-community.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel website : http://www.koha-community.org/ git : http://git.koha-community.org/ bugs : http://bugs.koha-community.org/ -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Brendan A. Gallagher ByWater Solutions CEO Support and Consulting for Open Source Software Installation, Data Migration, Training, Customization, Hosting and Complete Support Packages Headquarters: Santa Barbara, CA - Office: Redding, CT Phone # (888) 900-8944 http://bywatersolutions.com info@bywatersolutions.com<mailto:info@bywatersolutions.com>
On 13 February 2015 at 10:14, Marshall Breeding < marshall.breeding@librarytechnology.org> wrote:
Brendan,
Some personnel FTE numbers from last year can be seen on the tables from the Library Systems Report:
http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/sites/americanlibrariesmagazine.org...
The numbers are for the company overall, and not limited to efforts expended on specific products or projects.
In that case for Catalyst there are 235 staff, of which 182 are devs
Chris
Now that we have a better idea of the answer you are looking for. Roughly estimating all companies that support Koha (12 of them in India, 6 in Spain alone) I'd say Koha is 1500+ easily. On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 1:22 PM, Chris Cormack <chris@bigballofwax.co.nz> wrote:
On 13 February 2015 at 10:14, Marshall Breeding < marshall.breeding@librarytechnology.org> wrote:
Brendan,
Some personnel FTE numbers from last year can be seen on the tables from the Library Systems Report:
http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/sites/americanlibrariesmagazine.org...
The numbers are for the company overall, and not limited to efforts expended on specific products or projects.
In that case for Catalyst there are 235 staff, of which 182 are devs
Chris
-- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Brendan A. Gallagher ByWater Solutions CEO Support and Consulting for Open Source Software Installation, Data Migration, Training, Customization, Hosting and Complete Support Packages Headquarters: Santa Barbara, CA - Office: Redding, CT Phone # (888) 900-8944 http://bywatersolutions.com info@bywatersolutions.com
And that misses the point, That's just companies - were a majority is volunteer time. Like Chris is paid to work on Koha 1 FTE, but that's only about 1/2 of the amount of time he works on Koha, easily another 40 hours a week is all completely volunteer. Good difficult questions Marshall (you totally got me thinking today - I love it) - I don't think the project will ever be fairly compared. I'd just say the open source project rocks all by itself ;) On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 1:24 PM, Brendan Gallagher < info@bywatersolutions.com> wrote:
Now that we have a better idea of the answer you are looking for.
Roughly estimating all companies that support Koha (12 of them in India, 6 in Spain alone) I'd say Koha is 1500+ easily.
On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 1:22 PM, Chris Cormack <chris@bigballofwax.co.nz> wrote:
On 13 February 2015 at 10:14, Marshall Breeding < marshall.breeding@librarytechnology.org> wrote:
Brendan,
Some personnel FTE numbers from last year can be seen on the tables from the Library Systems Report:
http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/sites/americanlibrariesmagazine.org...
The numbers are for the company overall, and not limited to efforts expended on specific products or projects.
In that case for Catalyst there are 235 staff, of which 182 are devs
Chris
--
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Brendan A. Gallagher ByWater Solutions CEO
Support and Consulting for Open Source Software Installation, Data Migration, Training, Customization, Hosting and Complete Support Packages Headquarters: Santa Barbara, CA - Office: Redding, CT Phone # (888) 900-8944 http://bywatersolutions.com info@bywatersolutions.com
-- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Brendan A. Gallagher ByWater Solutions CEO Support and Consulting for Open Source Software Installation, Data Migration, Training, Customization, Hosting and Complete Support Packages Headquarters: Santa Barbara, CA - Office: Redding, CT Phone # (888) 900-8944 http://bywatersolutions.com info@bywatersolutions.com
I'd like to also add our company, We've just started to develop for Koha 9 months ago, however, we support (I think) the biggest public library ogranization in the world in count, 1120 public libraries of Turkey. Our team is 5 FTE for the moment, including developers, documentation, support and management. Thanks. Mengu Devinim Software On 02/12/2015 11:24 PM, Brendan Gallagher wrote:
Now that we have a better idea of the answer you are looking for.
Roughly estimating all companies that support Koha (12 of them in India, 6 in Spain alone) I'd say Koha is 1500+ easily.
On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 1:22 PM, Chris Cormack <chris@bigballofwax.co.nz> wrote:
On 13 February 2015 at 10:14, Marshall Breeding < marshall.breeding@librarytechnology.org> wrote:
Brendan,
Some personnel FTE numbers from last year can be seen on the tables from the Library Systems Report:
http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/sites/americanlibrariesmagazine.org...
The numbers are for the company overall, and not limited to efforts expended on specific products or projects.
In that case for Catalyst there are 235 staff, of which 182 are devs Chris
For most of the vendors in the table, development is focused on one strategic product. In some cases they may also have some other projects, so that whole number may not be devoted to the main ILS. The column of interest is the one for “Dev” counting only developers, not the total headcount of the company. That’s the one for which I am trying to derive a comparable figure for Koha. I know that Catalyst is quite a large company involved with many projects, but I’m specifically interested in the personnel resources allocated to Koha. -marshall From: Chris Cormack [mailto:chris@bigballofwax.co.nz] Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2015 3:23 PM To: Marshall Breeding Cc: Brendan Gallagher; Tomas Cohen Arazi; koha@lists.katipo.co.nz; koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org Subject: Re: [Koha-devel] [Koha] Koha development On 13 February 2015 at 10:14, Marshall Breeding <marshall.breeding@librarytechnology.org<mailto:marshall.breeding@librarytechnology.org>> wrote: Brendan, Some personnel FTE numbers from last year can be seen on the tables from the Library Systems Report: http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/sites/americanlibrariesmagazine.org... The numbers are for the company overall, and not limited to efforts expended on specific products or projects. In that case for Catalyst there are 235 staff, of which 182 are devs Chris
While I can understand the motivation behind such a comparison, I think it’s going to be comparing apples to oranges. After all, what is Koha? While the elected release and maintenance teams focus on the “strategic product” fronted by koha-community.org, there is an unknown number of companies and libraries around the world who are working on developing Koha in different ways. Many people will register a bug report, write a patch, test a patch, and upstream a patch without it seeing production beforehand. However, there are many patches which will see production at a local level, before being upstreamed to koha-community.org and distributed globally. There are also many patches in production at the local level which might never be upstreamed for any number of reasons. For instance, here at Prosentient Systems in Australia, we integrate Koha with a lot of our other “strategic products” which are marketed towards Australian libraries in particular. While I try to upstream more and more patches, the global stats won’t ever reflect the amount of development work I actually put into Koha. Which gets me back to “what is Koha”? You could argue that it’s the global product. That since it is “the” version, that it is the definitive product, and thus the thing to be measured. Yet, lots of people who have access to Koha via an entity with development resources (this could be a commercial company but it could also be the IT department or technical library staff) will experience a slightly different Koha. I suppose you could argue that those are all forks of Koha, although the silverware analogy is a bit passé. If you think about Ubuntu and Debian, Ubuntu contributes patches back to Debian. How then to measure development efforts for Debian? Is it current and pending patches for Debian? Is it also time spent developing Ubuntu which may be upstreamed back into Debian? How do you measure time per se? There’s a lot that goes into a commit and there’s a lot that goes into development which isn’t even related to a commit. I admit that I’m curious about the “real” numbers myself. I’m curious how much time goes into development for a proprietary product versus an open source product. However, I don’t think comparing is that straightforward. None of us are employed by Koha. I suppose you could try to count all the different companies that support Koha and count how many developers they have working on Koha… which I think is what you’re trying to do… but that goes back to the original problem. What is Koha? What is Koha development? I probably spend 95-99% of my time working on Koha, but some of that is support and some of that is development. Some days it’s all support, and some days it’s all development. And then there are the unpaid volunteer hours. Many of us also put in a lot of unpaid hours which are pretty much impossible to quantify. I’m sure some of us devote dedicated unpaid hours to Koha. However, I know that I tend to put in unpaid hours depending on particular issues or how much free time I might have at a given time. I doubt you’re going to have developers of proprietary products willingly putting in unpaid hours, so there’s no one-to-one comparison there either. I think we really want to know the numbers, and I think media tries to provide them. When Heartbleed broke, we were told that there were 4 OpenSSL developers and 1 or 2 of those were FTE. If you look at <https://www.openssl.org/about/> https://www.openssl.org/about/, it lists 15 active developers. There’s no indication of how much time they devote and I imagine it would be difficult to measure it. It’s remarked that GPG has 1 FTE and is working on getting a 2nd FTE. That one might be easier to quantify… but I’m curious about how many contributions are made to that project as well which aren’t indicated much of the time. In any case, both of those projects seems to have relatively small lists of active developers published. If you visit <http://git.koha-community.org/stats/koha-master/authors.html> http://git.koha-community.org/stats/koha-master/authors.html and sort by “Last commit”, you’ll see 24 developers have contributed in 2015 (including yours truly). If you go back to the start of 2014 to the present, it’s about 93 developers. Of course, some of those might just be one or two contributions here or there. But what about the developers of proprietary products? How much time is spent in team meetings? How much time is spent writing code? Reviewing code? What is development? That’s probably an even more difficult question than the previous ones. This is where you get into the whole argument of development versus operations, and the whole DevOps thing. How much of support is actually part of development and vice versa? Even comparing development FTEs between companies with proprietary products might not make sense because the actual work is so variable. You could say this company has this many FTEs working on the ILS product. That’s probably general enough to be true. However, in terms of FTEs on development, I don’t think it’s going to be very reflective :/. For instance, let’s look at <http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/sites/americanlibrariesmagazine.org/files/content/Charts_MarshallBreeding.pdf> http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/sites/americanlibrariesmagazine.org.... It states that there was 1 “Dev” at ByWater Solutions in 2013. Ok, there might have been one FTE “developer” employed there. However, I know for a fact that ByWater Solutions sent patches from at least 4 people in that year, and that’s probably an under-estimate. Here at Prosentient Systems, all the contributions to the Koha community are vetted through myself, but we generally have two people working on Koha. However, we have different hats as well. It’s impossible to say how much of our time is spent with the Development hat. Yet, if we don’t provide you with a number, then the number that you do report will also be incorrect. So it’s more than 0 but less than 2. David Cook Systems Librarian Prosentient Systems 72/330 Wattle St, Ultimo, NSW 2007 From: koha-devel-bounces@lists.koha-community.org [mailto:koha-devel-bounces@lists.koha-community.org] On Behalf Of Marshall Breeding Sent: Friday, 13 February 2015 8:34 AM To: Chris Cormack Cc: koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org; koha@lists.katipo.co.nz Subject: Re: [Koha-devel] [Koha] Koha development For most of the vendors in the table, development is focused on one strategic product. In some cases they may also have some other projects, so that whole number may not be devoted to the main ILS. The column of interest is the one for “Dev” counting only developers, not the total headcount of the company. That’s the one for which I am trying to derive a comparable figure for Koha. I know that Catalyst is quite a large company involved with many projects, but I’m specifically interested in the personnel resources allocated to Koha. -marshall From: Chris Cormack [mailto:chris@bigballofwax.co.nz] Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2015 3:23 PM To: Marshall Breeding Cc: Brendan Gallagher; Tomas Cohen Arazi; koha@lists.katipo.co.nz <mailto:koha@lists.katipo.co.nz> ; koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org <mailto:koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org> Subject: Re: [Koha-devel] [Koha] Koha development On 13 February 2015 at 10:14, Marshall Breeding <marshall.breeding@librarytechnology.org <mailto:marshall.breeding@librarytechnology.org> > wrote: Brendan, Some personnel FTE numbers from last year can be seen on the tables from the Library Systems Report: http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/sites/americanlibrariesmagazine.org... The numbers are for the company overall, and not limited to efforts expended on specific products or projects. In that case for Catalyst there are 235 staff, of which 182 are devs Chris
Hi! On 12 February 2015 at 15:07, Marshall Breeding <marshall.breeding@librarytechnology.org> wrote:
Could each of the support firms or individuals involved in Koha development please either post to this list or send to me individually the FTE that you or your organization contributes for each of the major categories of activity?
Libriotech is (so far!) a one man band, I am the sole employee. That is the easy part. In 2014 I held a temporary part time position at Oslo Public Library, so all my work on Koha was done on their time. In 2015 I plan to do some development and some QA and contribute to the Koha wiki. Maybe, if I'm lucky, I can achieve this: Development: 4-50% QA: 10% But I also have customers I need to keep happy, so only time will tell how it actually turns out... Best regards, Magnus Enger Libriotech
Marshall - I think we are all curious to what you are going to say here? Thanks, Brendan On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 12:21 AM, Magnus Enger <magnus@libriotech.no> wrote:
Hi!
On 12 February 2015 at 15:07, Marshall Breeding <marshall.breeding@librarytechnology.org> wrote:
Could each of the support firms or individuals involved in Koha development please either post to this list or send to me individually the FTE that you or your organization contributes for each of the major categories of activity?
Libriotech is (so far!) a one man band, I am the sole employee. That is the easy part.
In 2014 I held a temporary part time position at Oslo Public Library, so all my work on Koha was done on their time.
In 2015 I plan to do some development and some QA and contribute to the Koha wiki. Maybe, if I'm lucky, I can achieve this:
Development: 4-50% QA: 10%
But I also have customers I need to keep happy, so only time will tell how it actually turns out...
Best regards, Magnus Enger Libriotech _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list http://koha-community.org Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha
-- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Brendan A. Gallagher ByWater Solutions CEO Support and Consulting for Open Source Software Installation, Data Migration, Training, Customization, Hosting and Complete Support Packages Headquarters: Santa Barbara, CA - Office: Redding, CT Phone # (888) 900-8944 http://bywatersolutions.com info@bywatersolutions.com
Adding into the mixing pot, I agree with all the above comments and that is hard to measure. In the blunted of terms ptfs Europe has 2.5 FTE devs working on koha, plus 2 FTE in koha support who also sign off on patches so that's development time in you metric right? Outside of hours in sure our team contribute more, for instance on average I also add anything between 1 and 10 hours a week to my qa role and another 1 to 3 hours on my module maintainer role. So in effect should I count as more than one fte. I best put the usual gymph in that the above are just my own estimates, or company is constantly growing and changing to meet demand and as such our numbers will always fluctuate around the above averages. Martin On 20 Feb 2015 06:26, "Brendan Gallagher" <info@bywatersolutions.com> wrote:
Marshall -
I think we are all curious to what you are going to say here?
Thanks, Brendan
On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 12:21 AM, Magnus Enger <magnus@libriotech.no> wrote:
Hi!
On 12 February 2015 at 15:07, Marshall Breeding <marshall.breeding@librarytechnology.org> wrote:
Could each of the support firms or individuals involved in Koha development please either post to this list or send to me individually the FTE that you or your organization contributes for each of the major categories of activity?
Libriotech is (so far!) a one man band, I am the sole employee. That is the easy part.
In 2014 I held a temporary part time position at Oslo Public Library, so all my work on Koha was done on their time.
In 2015 I plan to do some development and some QA and contribute to the Koha wiki. Maybe, if I'm lucky, I can achieve this:
Development: 4-50% QA: 10%
But I also have customers I need to keep happy, so only time will tell how it actually turns out...
Best regards, Magnus Enger Libriotech _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list http://koha-community.org Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha
--
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Brendan A. Gallagher ByWater Solutions CEO
Support and Consulting for Open Source Software Installation, Data Migration, Training, Customization, Hosting and Complete Support Packages Headquarters: Santa Barbara, CA - Office: Redding, CT Phone # (888) 900-8944 http://bywatersolutions.com info@bywatersolutions.com
_______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list Koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org http://lists.koha-community.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel website : http://www.koha-community.org/ git : http://git.koha-community.org/ bugs : http://bugs.koha-community.org/
participants (9)
-
Brendan Gallagher -
Chris Cormack -
David Cook -
Magnus Enger -
Marshall Breeding -
Mengu Yazicioglu -
Paul Poulain -
Renvoize, Martin -
Tomas Cohen Arazi