Code Review and Analysis without counting Lines of Code.
“Hi Jim, the XY project is behind schedule. Would you report on your team’s progress and identify roadblocks that may be hindering development?”
Jim has been involved in the software development process as a lead dev for a few years and knows this routine. Greg, the CEO, has stakeholders riding him for the newest version release, and so Greg comes to Jim looking for a solution. The problem is, how can Jim show Greg how hard his team has been working on this project?
For a Lead Dev like Jim there are not very many options. He could use GitStats to give metrics like file count and lines of code, but counting lines of code is as useless as telling an artist they need to increase their brush strokes.
Later, Jim approaches Stephen, the newest member of his team.
“Hey Stephen, great work on feature X. How are things going with feature Y?”
“Good,” replied Stephen
Always the same response, “Good”. How was Jim supposed to help his team if the response is always the same?
Jim went back to his desk to read over his team’s commits for his daily code review. As he scrolls through commits, and looked at the lines of code nothing stood out. His team must actually be doing “Good”.
What Jim doesn’t notice is that Stephen has been pushing small commits the past few days that have not made much of an impact. Stephen is stuck on a problem but too afraid to ask for help.
How can Jim show Greg the impact and productivity of his developers, identify when his team is stuck, and review their code in a way that’s insightful?
The next day Jim found GitClear, a software for better code review and analysis.
GitClear applies a process that groups commits together based on their similarity. It can also show where a user is excelling, and where they might be having trouble.
By looking at Stephen’s progress in GitClear, Jim realizes that Stephen’s biggest challenges are in the database layer. At their next 1 on 1, Jim mentions the company’s paid database training. Stephen grows as a developer, and with his increased performance, the team ships feature Y on time and with fewer bugs than ever.
Not only did GitClear provide the insight needed to approach his team member with relevant suggestions, it also grouped like commits together, decreasing the time he spent reviewing code, and it gave insightful metrics that Jim could use to show Greg the impact and effort going into the new feature.
