I’ve written a tutorial for the Linux Voice magazine explaining how you can analyse the robustness of a project from it’s git repository using the ‘bus factor’ metric.

The bus factor is the number of developers that would need to be hit by a bus before the project they were working on is in serious trouble. Obviously the situation doesn’t need to be that dramatic. It could be as commonplace as having people leave by choice or through sickness etc. The general idea is that the more people who have worked on some code, the more robust the development process.

The tutorial provides an introduction to the R Studio editor and the popular visualisation package GGPlot2. It also demonstrates the analyse with reference to some of the most popular open source projects like the Linux Kernel and Open SSL.

You can download the tutorial now with a subscription to Linux Voice or wait until September 2016 when issue 21 will be released (under a CC-BY-SA license) as back issues are available to download for free.