How to define a health metric for a community?
We say that a system is healthy if it efficiently does what it has been designed for. In other words, with healthy metrics we measure efficiency. Efficiency of a system is a broad term and can be measured in many ways. As a result, to avoid the problem of interpreting health metrics, we want to reduce the number of the metrics to a single metric that measures the most important process on which all others depend. To determine this process, ask yourself the following questions:
- What does health or success mean for the system?
- If everything goes well, what will the system look like?
The answer to these questions is what needs to be measured. The resulting metric is the health metric for the system.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.