FOSDEM 2016
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Schedule
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Events
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Lightning Talks
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Learning about software development with Kibana dashboards

Learning about software development with Kibana dashboards

Track: Lightning Talks
Room: H.2215 (Ferrer)
Day: Sunday
Start: 10:40
End: 10:55

If you have 15 minutes, in this talk you can learn how to explore data from git or Gerrit repositories, using a Kibana-based dashboard. The talk will explain how to retrieve the data from the repositories, how to visualize different aspects of it, and how to produce a dashboard with those visualization. The dashboard, once composed, allows for selective filtering, drilling-down, and in general, knowing about the internals of a free, open source software project at any level of detail. Is there a better way of spending 15 minutes?

Free, open source software (FOSS) projects with an open development model offer a great deal of data in their public development repositories. Among them, git and Gerrit are some of the most common. That data can be retrieved and analyzed to learn about how the project is working. Who is contributing, who is reviewing code, how much time they spend in code review, etc.

Once an arcane art, analyzing these repositories is today becoming more and more easy for anyone. In this talk, I will show how the data can be extracted from the repositories, and how once it is stored in a database, it can be easily analyzed. As an example, ElasticSearch will be used as database, and Kibana as the tool to produce analytics dashboards. Both are FOSS products, easy to install, which allows anyone, even with basic skills, to reproduce the procedure presented in the talk.

But even when the procedure is simple, and the tools used in it are FOSS and readily available, the dashboards produced are rich, and allow for detailed drill down. Some examples of the dashboards that can be produced are: