🔌 Plugin: Component Scoring Plugin

[Fox32]

Summary

While the features of Backstage itself might be a good way to make teams to register their components to Backstage, it might no be sufficient. One idea would be a linting / scoring / gamification plugin that has specific rules and give a score to a component. To make it more visible, an aggregated team score would be useful.

Inspiration could be the "Pub Points" from the package manager Pub. But compared to Pub, not the implementation, but the entity description in Backstage is scored.

Example Condition:

• Component has an owner
• Component has a short description
• Component has tags
• Component has ci/cd tool linked
• Component has tech-docs linked
• Components contains no typos (vale?)
• Component has a annotation xyz... Here is where it is getting quite specific to the cooperate.

Cooperates might want to provide custom rules on what informations should be available in the catalog.

The plugin should contain an extensible scoring logic, a score display on the entity page, a score display on the team home page and if possible a list of all components sorted by their score.

Context

I wonder if there is already such a plugin at Spotify. Might the tech-insights plugin fall into the same problem space, just for the implementation of a component?

[palmerj3]

We have pretty much this exact tooling on our internal Spotify backstage!

Would there be interest in us open sourcing this and making it a part of backstage?

[Fox32]

We have pretty much this exact tooling on our internal Spotify backstage!

Would there be interest in us open sourcing this and making it a part of backstage?

From my point: sure!

[adamdmharvey]

Potentially tangential to the initial of just having a scoring/gamification plugin, would be allowing other plugins to add into / extend the gamification.

For example, there are repolinters out there that check your GitHub repo uses some best practices such as:

• Existence of README.md
• Existence of CONTRIBUTING.md
• Existence of a LICENSE
• Existence of a .gitignore
• and so on...

These could then introduce an additional scoring badge into the main scoring plugin. Or a scoring badge that gets added to a 3rd party plugin pages as a widget, that sort of thing?

[adamdmharvey]

Tying into Squads/Org plugin

Tying this together, I wonder if gamification scoring could be extendable in a sense that it could apply to Components (as requested here in) but also to Squads (reference backstage/backstage#2752).

The videos/screengrabs we've seen of Spotify's internal Backstage seem to lean in this direction, and in our never ending approach to try to drive accountability to our squads and teams, having them compete for quality also in a larger company helps tie into engineering leadership and quarterly/yearly goals, etc.

So a mechanism to somehow define a score hierarchy, maybe per component, then average/sum the score UP to the squad team for all of their owned catalog items.

Extensible scoring

Defining a set of core scores, but making the scoring extensible would be great. We have a training tool where we track completed training, and some of the data is manual (no APIs yet!) and would be great to be able to extend it with some custom code doing something as simple as loading a CSV or raw JSON and processing it, and then "adding" a score to the main score in some fashion.

[adamdmharvey]

@palmerj3 you noted before a possibility of open sourcing this plugin from Spotify. any further thoughts on this? even if they are just some of the concepts/high-level implementation/lessons learned from your internal implementation might give the community some ideas to proceed with it.

I think requirements off the top of my head:

• A widget that can be displayed near the about card on a Group entity page
• A full page (i.e., a tab?) that gives more details on the score for the Group
• A competition page, possibly separate from the rest, which show the a table of the teams, with maybe rows 1, 2, 3, in much larger text than all the others, possibly with sparklines in one of the rows as well?
• A score trend displayed overtime, such that I can see a score go up or go down.
• "Fun" scoring system. By this I mean, school-type lettering (A, B+, C, ...) can bring back fearful memories of yesteryears. Numeric percentages are good, but boring and mathematical (74%). I might prefer something letting a team select emoji icons which might relate to their industry. Squad A: 🦊🦊 , Squad B: . 🦊🦊🦊🦊, Squad C: 🦊🦊, and they are made up of the 20% percentile ranges. ⭐⭐⭐⭐, or 🥇🥇🥇🥇🥇. That sort of thing?

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[Fox32]

As this is a plugin suggestion, I don't think that we should close it. Any thoughts? Or should we handle plugin suggestions as discussions in the future?