How much goes into writing it down
The Docs slice is the share of Engineering Throughput that lands in documentation: READMEs, reference pages, guides, changelogs, architecture decision records. Like Tests, it used to be absorbed into the bucket of whatever it documented, and like Tests it has no target number — a rising or falling Docs share is a fact about the quarter, not a grade.
DOCS SHARE BY DAY
Each bar is one day's docs share — that day's Docs ETV divided by total ETV. The line is the 90-day trailing rolling average — the underlying trend.
Baseline
4.3%
90-day rolling avg ending 2025-04-01
Latest
3.9%
90-day rolling avg ending 2026-08-22
Change (percentage points)
−0.4 pp
from 4.3% to 3.9% across the 90-day rolling series
How to read it
Faint barsare each day's raw Docs share (that day's Docs ETV divided by total ETV). The bold line is the 90-day trailing rolling average — the trend that matters.
The headline is the change in percentage points between the first and the most recent endpoint of the 90-day rolling-average line. It is uncoloured on purpose: neither direction is good or bad on its own. Docs share is also the spikiest of the five slices, because one docs-site migration can dominate a month.
Why it matters
Docs share is the cheapest available proxy for how much of a project's knowledge lives outside the maintainers' heads. For an open-source project that is a real asset: it is what lets a new engineer land a first patch without asking anyone.
But it moves for reasons that have nothing to do with engineering quality — a major release, a docs platform migration, an onboarding push. A project that sits near zero for many quarters while its user base grows is worth a look. Beyond that, read Docs share as context for the other four slices, not as a score.
How we measure docs share change, and how to read the trend.
Show methodologyHide methodology
How we measure docs share change, and how to read the trend.
Show methodologyHide methodologyWhat counts as Docs
Markdown and reStructuredText pages, docs-site sources, READMEs, changelogs, architecture decision records, and the inputs to generated API reference. Same file-scoped rule as Tests: documenting a new feature splits between Features and Docs.
How shares are computed
For each day we sum the Engineering Throughput of merged commits, split by category, and divide by the daily total across all five categories. The rolling-average overlay is a 90-day trailing mean. The most recent day is dropped if it looks like a partial sync.
How the change is computed
We compare the first and the most recent point of the 90-day rolling series — the leftmost and rightmost values of the bold line on the chart — and report the difference in percentage points. Both endpoints are single 90-day rolling readings, not calendar-quarter averages, so they stay aligned with the rest of the site's rolling-90d convention.