Improving "Plugin Health Score" scoring abilities

Keeping a plugin current with the ongoing development of Jenkins is key for a smooth operation. Keeping it current can require user interface improvements, dependency updates, and more.

“Plugin Health Score” was a successful GSoC 2022 project. It laid the principles, the framework, and the automation for this important feature. For reference, the code product of the original 2022 GSoc project can be viewed on GitHub.

Measurements of the plugin’s "health" helps Jenkins maintainers as they decide how to invest their development time. With such a system, items that need to be maintained, improved, or adapted are identified.
For example, having Release Drafter correctly configured and Pull Request Labeling in place is a recognized good practice. It reduces the effort to provide a changelog with each release.
Another example: having Dependabot properly configured will reduce the dependency update effort by automatically submitting update pull requests.

Measurements of the plugin’s "health" will help users to decide if they should install and use a plugin. Plugins with a lower health score may be less likely to meet the user’s reliability needs. It is similar to a badly maintained garden that will make harvesting difficult and not yield good vegetables or fruits.

The probes purpose is to gather data on the plugins. The plugin health score already has a few probes implemented. Now it’s your turn to implement more probes.

A “Plugin Health Score Probe” will be executed on all the plugins to get the status or measure a given indicator. Some can be quite simple, but others need creativity and skills. The more probes we have, the better the health score quality and its representativity. Bottom line: we need more probes…

With those new probes, in addition of the existing ones, we can improve the score representation of the plugin.

A presentation of the "Plugin Health Score" project was made during the 10-Feb-2022 GSoC Office Hour.

A presentation of the status of the "Plugin Health Score" project at the end of GSoC 2022 was made during the 05-Oct-2022 GSoC Final Edition.

Existing probes are listed at Plugin Health Scoring :: Probes

Beginner to Intermediate

175 hours

New probes to help improve the plugin health score.

Details to be clarified interactively, together with the mentors, during the Contributor Application drafting phase.

Improving and new scoring implementation in the project.

For some newbie friendly issues, please refer to the Plugin Health Scoring issue tracker on GitHub. Look out for the friendly label for some issues that can be served as an introduction to the project.