Most dashboards want to show you everything. Contributors, stars, commits per author per timezone, badge walls, heatmaps. It looks impressive in a screenshot. It's almost useless in a standup.
PulseBoard shows seven numbers. Not because seven is magic, but because these are the seven that answer a question a reviewer actually asks:
The questions, and the signal that answers each one
- Is CI green? → CI status (last 10 runs pass rate).
- Do the tests actually run on real code? → Coverage (README badge, coverage.xml fallback).
- Is anyone reviewing PRs? → PR age (open PRs older than 7 days).
- Is the project alive? → Commit activity (commits in last 30 days).
- Is it safe to install? → Dependency health (open Dependabot alerts).
- Can I legally use this? → License (SPDX-detectable license file).
- Is the maintainer still shipping? → Release cadence (time since last tag).
If you can't map a metric to a decision, the metric is decoration. Star counts don't change what you do on Monday morning. A CI failure does.
Why not more?
Every extra signal:
- increases the cognitive cost of the dashboard (more pills to read, more things that could be red);
- degrades the single-number score, because averaging eight noisy inputs is worse than averaging five good ones;
- makes the ranking illegible — "why is my score 73?" gets harder with every axis you add.
We picked seven because the Pulse Score normalizes cleanly over whatever subset a repo actually produces. If a repo has no releases yet (new project), that slot is unknown and doesn't drag the score down. The honest fallback matters more than a wider grid.
What we deliberately don't measure
- Stars, forks, subscribers. Vanity metrics. A 50-star repo can be healthier than a 5000-star one.
- Contributor count. Says nothing about quality of review.
- Lines of code. Bigger isn't better. Often the opposite.
- Time since first commit. Age ≠ maturity.
PulseBoard is not a leaderboard. It's a vital signs monitor. If your repo is green, keep shipping. If it drops, you already know where to look.