Responsiveness measures whether the work arriving at a project — bug reports, feature requests, contributed patches — actually gets handled. An issue tracker where reports accumulate unanswered, or a queue of pull requests closed without engagement, predicts the experience every future user and contributor will have.
- Category: Sustainability & Governance (25% within category)
- Weight in overall index: 6.0%
- Metric key:
responsiveness nullwhen the repository has no issues and no decided pull requests
How the value is computed
| Component | Weight | Criteria |
|---|---|---|
| Issue resolution | 46.75 | ratio of closed to total issues × 46.75 |
| PR acceptance | 38.25 | merged / (merged + closed unmerged) × 38.25 |
| OpenSSF Scorecard: Code-Review | 15 | Scorecard's 0–10 result, scaled to 15 points |
Counts are lifetime totals. Latency percentiles — how fast issues and pull requests are decided, over a recent window — are on the published methodology roadmap and will arrive with a version bump (see methodology versions).
Code-Review is complementary shared evidence: it checks approvals on changesets, whereas PR acceptance measures merge outcomes. It remains a Security component and is excluded here if Scorecard is unavailable or n/a.
What the two ratios mean
- Issue resolution reads the fraction of filed issues that reached a decision. Projects that triage honestly — fixing, answering, or closing with a reason — read well; projects where issues silently pile up read low.
- PR acceptance reads what happens to contributed code among pull requests that reached a decision. A very low merge share often marks a project that receives contributions but cannot or will not absorb them.
Reading the result
- Closing is deciding. The metric does not require that every issue be fixed — a maintained "wontfix" is a decision. What it penalizes is unbounded accumulation.
- Lifetime ratios move slowly. A project that recently improved its triage will see this metric recover gradually; the roadmap's time-windowed latency measures will make recent behavior more visible.
- Repositories with issues disabled and no PR history are
nullhere, with weights renormalized — see the health index.
Improving the value
- Triage on a schedule: label, answer, and close stale reports with a stated reason rather than leaving them open indefinitely.
- Decide pull requests both ways — merging good ones and explicitly declining unsuitable ones both count as stewardship.
- Templates from community health raise incoming quality and make sustained triage cheaper.
Related: maintainer resilience · Sustainability & Governance