

Ask HN: How to Analyze Coder Contribution - colinprince

How can I analyze the contribution a team member has made to our code bases?<p>Some of the work is open source, some not.<p>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?
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cperciva
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.

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mbrubeck
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.

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jefffoster
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.

