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Ask HN: How to Analyze Coder Contribution

by colinprince·17y ago·3 comments·view on hn ↗

How can I analyze the contribution a team member has made to our code bases?

Some of the work is open source, some not.

Is there a way to get a general feel for how active a person is and how well the contributions aged. E.g. were the contributions in an active area of the code base and stood the test of time?

3 comments

Ask not what contribution people have made to the code - ask what problems they solved thereby.

The person who makes the largest contribution is often not the person who writes the most code: In the extreme case, it can be a person who figured out how to increase functionality by removing code.

The real answer is to ask their peers. Developers know how much their teammates contribute. The hard part is giving them reasons to be honest with you.

Code statistics are fun, but they won't tell you anything real about productivity. That said, running "git blame" (or "cvs annotate" or other equivalent) over the whole code base will tell you whose contributions are still around today.

Check code_swarm out (http://code.google.com/p/codeswarm/). It'll give you a quick way of visualizing who changed what in the code base.