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GrimoireLab Guide

Code Changes

Question: How many changes were made to the source code during a specified period?

These are changes to the source code during a certain period. For “change” we consider what developers consider an atomic change to their code. In other words, a change is some change to the source code which usually is accepted and merged as a whole, and if needed, reverted as a whole too. For example, in the case of git, each “change” corresponds to a “commit”, or, to be more precise, “code change” corresponds to the part of a commit which touches files considered as source code.

Objectives

Volume of coding activity. Code changes are a proxy for the activity in a project. By counting the code changes in the set of repositories corresponding to a project, you can have an idea of the overall coding activity in that project. Of course, this metric is not the only one that should be used to track volume of coding activity.

Visualizations

Steps

  1. Click on Visualize option in the sidebar and click on the + icon to create a new visualization.

  2. Pick the Vertical Bar chart and select git as the index.

  3. You’ll be presented with the following default visualization.

commit count

  1. For Metrics set the aggregation to Unique Count and field to hash. Set the custom label as Commits as the current unique shows the total number of commits.

    metrics code changes

  2. For Buckets select the bucket type X-axis.

  3. Set the aggregation to Date Histogram, field to grimoire_creation_date and interval to Auto. Set the custom label to Time.

    bucket code changes

  4. In the end, your visualization would look something like the this.

code changes