White paper
(yea .. I have my own white paper too!!!!)
Successful measurements
(how to make RP a “result oriented” project)
Overview
Rainbow is growing so quickly. Almost every day we have request from people who wants to join the project and this is really great (most of them are really skilled).
So, I think that it’s time to think on .. how to measure if rainbow is successful. This paper is to show one methodology. I don’t know if this is the best, but I really like it.
In my opinion, everything we do is “result oriented”, the problem is to define “which result?”. An e-commerce website will focus on sold articles (may be the relation between sold and hits and more), while a municipality will focus on local citizens access to the portal (for a resort, may be that the foreign hits will be more important than the local ones).
At this point .. which is the best result for RP? Which are the goals (I don’t know if this is the most appropriate word .. in my mind, goal = what I have to measure)? which are the periods we need to compare? is there a minimum satisfactory limit? Can we define it?
Methodology
The goals: At 1st we must define the “goals” to which refer the measures. These goals are what we feel as “success” for our project and what we have to measure to be successful. I can propose some of them (at the end of this wp) but we must collect more.
Numbers / evaluation: when the goals have been chosen, we need to choose the periods. In this case I think that we should just measure the quality growth of our job, even if this method can be used to compare other solutions or competitors.
Once that we have goals (rows) and periods (columns) we can create a table where we can write the result.
We can write directly the numbers where we have numbers or we can write evaluation notes (xslow, slow, normal, fast, very fast). Each field must be translated in number (eg .. 1=xslow – 2=slow – 3=normal …). For the numbers we must indicate where to find them too.
At the end of this process we have a table full of numbers .. unluckily they can’t be compared. We need to normalize (is this english?)
Normalization process means to convert all the numbers in the same range, where the lower is 0 and the higher is 1.
We can study normalization functions to provide the right measure of satisfaction, (for example … if I provide water to a plant, the 1st 10 cl are very usefull, the next 10 cl are usefull, the next 10 are not so usefull .. if I provide further 10 cl the plant will die …
the horizontal 1-5 represents the number of cl (3=3rd water submission = 30 cl)
the vertical 0-10 represents now the submission is useful)
this mean that, for example, the number of people in the developer team must be related with our possibility of managing and organising of the team…. or the number of download must be within a fixed number before creating troubles to the host …
So, once that we have studied these functions, we can normalize and we get series between 0 and 1 only.
At this point, we have 2 ways. A general measurement and a personal measurement. I will talk about the general only.
We must define the WEIGHT of each goal. For example, if we think that the number of downloads is more important than the number of posts, we will give to the 1st aim an higher weight than the 2nd. At the end we have a list of weighted goals and this means that we have also a list of priority (and, above all, HOW MUCH a goal has priority in respect to an other one).
The last step is just math .. Weight x Number and then .. column sum …
At 1st we will have a number showing the actual level and the next is to compare if we r working well to increase in each period this number.
In my opinion we can develop in a spreadsheet (excel).
Is this a nightmare or a thing we can discuss about?
Goals
Numeric goals
· Numbers of download from sourgeforge
· Number of developers
· Number of contributors
· Number of members in the community
· Number of posts in the forum
· Number of sites made with rainbow
“analogic” goals
· Developers satisfaction
· Contributors satisfaction
· End user satisfaction
· Feedback on the net (forums, links, newspapers …)
· Graphic integration
· Performance (numbers or evaluation)
by Graz (graziano@duemetri.net) - v. 1.0 - 31.03.2003