Re: Method for Calculating Statistics of Developer Contribution to a Specified Branch.
- From
brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
- Date
- Oct 16, 2023, 21:25 UTC
- Message-ID
- <ZS2qZtYDvItovjqg@tapette.crustytoothpaste.net>
- In-Reply-To
- <CAGP6POKg4mSFv-Z+dD1aXDFDbxH9Xu1WCdCA5TGfCAM3NUUQLw@mail.gmail.com>
On 2023-10-16 at 14:10:01, Hongyi Zhao wrote:
Show 22 quoted lines
> Dear Git Mailing List,
>
> I am a developer currently working on a project and I wanted to
> establish statistics for each team member's contribution to a specific
> branch.
>
> Say, for a user "JianboLin", I am currently using the following method:
>
> $ git clone https://github.com/OrderN/CONQUEST-release.git
> $ cd CONQUEST-release
> $ git log --author="JianboLin" --stat --summary origin/f-mlff | awk
> 'NF ==4 && $2 =="|" && $3 ~/[0-9]+/ && $4 ~/[+-]+|[+]+|[-]+/ {s+=$3}
> END {print s}'
>
> Using the above command, I am able to calculate the number of lines
> contributed by a specific author on a specific branch, which allows me
> to quantify the contribution to a branch by each team member.
>
> However, I would like to know if a more efficient or accurate method
> exists to carry out this task. Are there any other parameters,
> commands, or aspects I need to consider to get a more comprehensive
> measure of contribution?Can you maybe explain what you want to measure and what your goal is in doing so?
The problem is that lines of code isn't really that useful as a measure of contribution value or developer productivity, which are the reasons people typically measure that metric. For example, with three lines, a colleague fixed a persistently difficult-to-reproduce problem which had been affecting many of our largest customers. That was a very valuable contribution, but not very large. I've made similar kinds of changes myself, both at work and in open source projects.
Certainly you can compute the number of lines of code changed by a developer, but that is not typically a very useful metric, since it doesn't lead you to any interesting conclusions about the benefits or value of the contributions or developer in question. However, perhaps you have a different goal in mind, and if you can explain what that is, we may be able to help you find a better way of doing it.
-- brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them) Toronto, Ontario, CA