Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash
Another quarter passes and we mark a year of progress in the Mautic Community since we held our first in-person community sprint in November 2019 at Contribution Day in Amsterdam.
Let’s kick off a roundup of all the awesome things that have happened this quarter!
Read the previous reports here for Q3 2020, Q2 2020 and Q1 2020.
Our first Mautic World Conference
November 2020 saw us run the first ever World Conference for the Mautic Community, MautiCon 2020. We were determined to hold an event that was welcoming to our worldwide community and as inclusive as possible.
With six tracks running simultaneously throughout the day, 17 sponsors, 51 speakers and 65 sessions across seven languages with 333 attendees, by all accounts it was a huge success!
Furthermore, the event generated just over $13,000 for the Mautic Community which has been transferred over to our Open Collective, in addition to the $595 that was received from Spreadshirt commissions on purchases from our Official Mautic Swag Shop.
This absolutely would not have been possible without the support of our amazing sponsors and the MautiCon 2020 Working Group, who put in endless hours of work behind the scenes to make the event happen. We would also like to extend a big thank you to the team from Veertly who expertly hosted the event on their platform.
If you missed some of the talks from MautiCon, don’t worry - they are all available on our YouTube channel here - make sure that you subscribe to get notified when we release new videos!
Initiatives, Tiger Teams and Working Groups
During my keynote at MautiCon I outlined my vision for the coming years and announced six strategic initiatives which we will be focusing on this year. These include:
You can read more about each and get updates on progress from their Confluence page.
Watch the keynote on YouTube:
Product updates
We fixed 93 bugs this quarter in our patch and minor releases, all of which were released on time in accordance with our release schedule.
We also merged 30 features and enhancements this quarter including releasing Mautic 3.2 , bringing improvements both to the product itself and to our behind-the-scenes tooling which has massively simplified the process of making a new release.
With Mautic 2 coming to the end of security support in December 2020 , we are expecting to see a significant reduction in the 2,000+ active Mautic instances running the 2.x version in the coming months.
Despite a lot of hard work we were not able to hit our target of getting the open Pull Requests and Issues under 100 by the end of the year - but we are still chasing the goal!
Code related metrics
We continue to see relative stability when it comes to commits being merged over time, which we would expect at this stage of the project. As we start to work on new initiatives, we are expecting to see increases in activity.
We are also continuing to see a growth in commits from the community - this chart excludes commits from Mautic Inc./Acquia.
When we break this down by organisation we can see who are supporting Mautic, with the top organisations this quarter being Webmecanik, Fits 4 All (Dennis Ameling) and Acquia.
We continue to attract new developers to Mautic as demonstrated below, which shows the number of developers that made their first commit by month.
When considering those contributing to Mautic Core, we can see that there has been a fluctuating number of contributors active across the quarters this year. We anticipate that this will smooth out and grow over the coming year, with more regular and core contributors who are consistently contributing to Mautic throughout the year.
The Product Team are continuing in their efforts to work through the backlog of issues which is reflected in the Backlog Management Index (BMI) below - defined as the number of closed issues divided by the number of open ones in a given period of time, and the lead time - the time expressed in days between the initiation and completion of a production process, in this case, an issue.
As we are closing some very old issues in this process we expect to see fluctuations for some time in the lead time.
The Product Team have recently implemented a Stalebot which will automatically tag stale issues with no recent updates and after a specified time has elapsed with no further activity, the issue will be closed.
As Mautic 2 is now formally outside of support, any issues which relate to Mautic 2 will be closed unless they are reproduced in Mautic 3.
We are continuing to see a fairly consistent number of pull requests coming in from across the community, with the top organisations contributing this quarter being Webmecanik, Acquia and Fits 4 All (Dennis Ameling).
Our regular release cadence means that we are just about able to keep pace with the incoming pull requests while working through the older ones, which have often required extensive work to bring them up to date and ensure good automated test coverage. The chart below shows that we do have a small number of older pull requests outstanding but the majority are from 2019 and later, which have a plan for getting them merged.
Accordingly, our efficiency at merging pull requests is continuing to remain relatively stable, as can be seen from the chart below. This demonstrates the Review Efficiency Index (REI), defined as the number of closed pull requests divided by the number of open ones in a given period of time.
With an average of only 17 active contributors over the past quarter we are slightly below the 5-year average demonstrated by the red line, with the average over the past 12 months being 18 contributors.
We would love to see this grow in the coming years as we welcome more contributors with the development of our community and the start of our Strategic Initiatives.
When considering the community as a whole across all Github repositories, Slack, Forums and Meetup, we are continuing to see above average engagement and a very slight positive trend line against the five-year average.
This year has seen a very positive change in community engagement and is a solid base for us to continue to grow over the coming months and years.
Conclusion
This has been a very full quarter with a huge amount of energy being put into our first ever Mautic World Conference and launching our plans for the future of Mautic.
Alongside that we have kept pace with our release schedule and continue to see growth across the community - all of this at the height of the global pandemic - quite an achievement!
I am excited for what the future holds and look forward to an exciting year ahead!
