Well, here we are. Drupal 7's release is imminent and once again here are some statistics for folks to review. This is a truly amazing feat: over 950 people were credited in the commit messages as a contributor to Drupal 7. There were, of course, several thousand people involved in the issue queue but a mention in the commit message is reserved for people who did a serious amount of work whether that was writing code, design, reviewing, creating tests, writing text (i.e. documentation), or some other form.

Analysis of the Drupal Commit Data

Here are some items I noticed.

• There were 954 people mentioned.
• A total of 10,091 mentions in 6,117 patches means that there were about 1.6 people per patch
• The top 10 people were mentioned in 30% of the commits
• The top 20% were mentioned in 85%
• People with 3 or fewer mentions form a group that are responsible for almost 10% of the mentions; we can't discount that long tail!

If we group people together into 9 somewhat logical groupings we can see this classic distribution.

You can get the file as an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet (.ods) or from Google docs

The top 10 Drupal 7 Contributors (as measured by this method)

I like to keep track of things. For halloween this year I tracked when people came and what their costumes were. You can see the google spreadsheet or download it as an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet.

For me, the interesting things were:

A few years ago I started a company to do some website building (gvs). When it was just me we didn't have any "HR" or "Accounting" process really because it was...just me. Our project process was really messy and I didn't necessarily bill hourly, nor flat fee, nor...whatever. Now we're a little more serious. We've got serious benefits, it's a team of 5 people, we do pretty solid work for a lot of different top tier companies.

That said, I found these two documents as I went through some old files today. These are from a company I worked in 7 years ago that was a startup, but had some serious "process" so they could feel like they were a real company. GVS is not now and probably never will be this kind of "serious."

I mean seriously. Look at how much time must have been wasted on that. And I get that a "holiday" list without some sense of design input is just plain depressing, but I don't think the clipart really got anyone into a festive mood.

One measure of the momentum of the fine Drupal project is the number of people who are creating contributed modules on drupal.org.

The Drupal contributed projects are stored in a system called CVS and data about that is stored in some database tables that keep track of each change by each person. At the request of some fine folks who are working on important things, I got interested in the idea of the trend related to people committing code to the drupal.org CVS server. Here is the data graphed by the number of committers per month. It is not the number of commits, which would show how active those people are, but the number of people which shows how big of a group of people is doing this work.

Also, this is only about the contributed module and theme area and not about Drupal core. Drupal core commits are done by a very small group of people after that small group reviews the code contributed by hundreds of contributers. So, this really shows activity of the non-core projects.

I've labeled 4 points on the graph.

1. 2006 through Drupal 5.0 slump

Point 1 shows a peak at June of 2006 followed by a slow down until the trough at August of 2006 and then some small increases until December of 2006. Then there is a huge increase in people in January and February of 2007 which is also when Drupal 5.0 was released.

2. 2007 Follows a similar contribution trend