Coder Analytics

In my past, I had done some work as a ClearCase administrator.  It wasn't for too long, because it was boring, but the things I learnt were extremely interesting.

** For those of you who don't know, ClearCase is a commercial version control system.  Software developers use it to version control code components (and indeed you could use it to version control any file -- including say documents).

So for example, such things as labelling, builds, branches, and revision history were my daily bread and butter.  The interesting thing about all of these is that they not only allow you to control the product going out but track who updated what and when.

The real challenge with any study in information or analysis is adding it all up. What's really important is not just the code then, but the information about how the users have built it.

Yesterday, I had only just  discovered today a way to dump all the history in a subversion repository in xml.  This is brilliant! Effectively it gives you the entire history of all the interactions with the version control repository.

With this, you can build analytics tools to analyse how the developers are working with the version control system. Why I had not researched tools like this before was beyond me.

One tool I have come across is StatSVN.

Check it out...

Pak