On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 10:07 AM, Quim Gil qgil@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi, thanks to the metrics reports now we know that the top bug fixers in November were Nobody (228) and Wikidata bugs (83)... followed by Michael Dale (28), Roan Kattouw (23), etc.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Community_metrics/November_2012#People
Those statistics don't actually measure who fixes bugs, they measure who the fixed bugs were assigned to. Those aren't necessarily the same person (although I imagine this is rare), but the larger issue is that, as you say, most bugs have no human assignee. Another statistic that is used in the BZ reports sent to this list is who closed the bug (i.e. changed its status to RESOLVED FIXED), but this is also suboptimal. For instance, in the VisualEditor team, James somewhat frequently cleans up after developers who fix a bug but forget to close it, or even mention the bug in the commit summary, so he's probably the top bug "fixer" in VE by that metric, even though most of that is just him taking paperwork off our hands. Another problem is that bugs can bounce between REOPENED and FIXED multiple times, and can be set to FIXED by different people each time.
So both metrics are noisy, although I imagine the latter would not have a 50% signal-to-noise ratio like the former. Getting more accuracy would be complicated: you'd probably have to look for Gerrit links on the bug and identify their authors, or something like that.
Not saying the metric you used is wrong (it has advantages and disadvantages), but I do think it's a bit misleadingly labeled.
Roan