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November 18, 2013 by annegentle

Who Wrote OpenStack Havana Docs?

I know, I know, OpenStack is too obsessed with statistics for contributors. I agree! I want to rise above it but the trend release-over-release for docs is way too tempting for me in my research lab for documentation. So allow me to indulge in some analysis that is similar to my post about this last release, Who Wrote OpenStack Grizzly Docs? Remember? We had 79 docs contributors overall, with 3 of us writing half of the changes for Grizzly. This time we had 130 docs contributors with 7 of us writing just over half the changes in overarching install/config/deploy/operations guides. Progress! We also had at least three supporting companies hire writers dedicated to OpenStack upstream docs. Full of win. I love having OpenStack job postings to offer great tech writers.

Worcester Terrace

We added 100,000 lines more than last release. What? Yes, it’s true. Much of that is from our autodoc efforts, pulling all 1500 configuration options directly from the code, but that’s a compelling number to share.

I ran the same scripts as last time to maintain consistency. All these stats are from the tools that aren’t being maintained any more from openstack-gitdm.

Here are the numbers for the openstack-manuals repository only:

Processed 966 csets from 130 developers
92 employers found
A total of 187524 lines added, 275056 removed (delta -87532)

Developers with the most changesets
 Andreas Jaeger 233 (24.1%)
 annegentle 89 (9.2%)
 Tom Fifield 70 (7.2%)
 Diane Fleming 70 (7.2%)
 Christian Berendt 65 (6.7%)
 Sean Roberts 44 (4.6%)
 Stephen Gordon 41 (4.2%)
 Summer Long 21 (2.2%)
 Lorin Hochstein 20 (2.1%)
 nerminamiller 17 (1.8%)
 Gauvain Pocentek 15 (1.6%)
 Emilien Macchi 15 (1.6%)
 Colin McNamara 14 (1.4%)
 Shaun McCance 13 (1.3%)
 Deepti Navale 11 (1.1%)
 Phil Hopkins 9 (0.9%)
 Aaron Rosen 8 (0.8%)
 Kurt Martin 8 (0.8%)
 Scott Radvan 7 (0.7%)
 Edgar Magana 7 (0.7%)
 Covers 80.434783% of changesets

This is another interesting data set:

Employers with the most hackers (total 136)
Red Hat                     12 (8.8%)
IBM                         12 (8.8%)
Rackspace                    8 (5.9%)
HP                           7 (5.1%)
Nicira                       4 (2.9%)
Mirantis                     4 (2.9%)
SUSE                         2 (1.5%)
Yahoo!                       2 (1.5%)
eNovance                     2 (1.5%)

I also ran these same stats for the api-site repository, where the API user docs are sourced. These docs are still quite different from a contributor and sourcing standpoint and I’m not sure why. Rackspace dedicating Diane Fleming has made a huge difference here, think of what we could do with one more dedicated API doc writer? Ok, we can’t clone Diane, but think of the possibilities.

Developers with the most changesets
Diane Fleming 46 (58.2%)
annegentle 5 (6.3%)
Cyril Roelandt 2 (2.5%)
Kersten Richter 2 (2.5%)
Brian Rosmaita 2 (2.5%)
Rupak Ganguly 2 (2.5%)
QingXin Meng 2 (2.5%)
ladquin 2 (2.5%)
dcramer 2 (2.5%)
Employers with the most hackers (total 23)
Rackspace 5 (21.7%)
IBM 5 (21.7%)
Red Hat 2 (8.7%)

I’m also a web analytics hound. What docs were the most accessed during the lead-up to the Havana release? Here are the top five:

  1. Swift Developer site
  2. Install Guides (Basic and Deploy, both Ubuntu and RedHat/Fedora/Centos)
  3. API Quick Start
  4. OpenStack Operations Guide
  5. Getting Virtual Machine Images page from the OpenStack Compute Administration Guide

To me, these stats show that we’re doing the right things such as dedicating a contractor to the install guide. Thank you Cisco. We still have areas to improve, such as API docs and ensuring end-user docs are a top priority. Our readers are definitely after both deployment and consumption of OpenStack clouds.

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Filed Under: techpubs, work, writing Tagged With: openstack

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