This is tool time of year: StatSVN is out
Published November 30, 2006 by John
It seems like a number of tools I use or have wanted are getting released, updated or just kicked off recently. The latest I found is StatSVN, a slick tool for documenting the activity on an Subversion repository.
It looks like this is a fork of StatCVS that started as a university project. This one is also very fresh, just released into the wild this month, but it looks promising. I’ve used StatCVS before, and I know that our project lead found it valuable when she needed to better understand where work was being done and by whom.
The usefulness of this kind of tool is really left to the managers or team members to decide; in essence it makes the code change process visible to everyone - commit frequency, size, author, broken down by date/time/author/etc. While it could be seen (or used) as a Big Brother tool, it also has the potential for giving useful data to make other points. For example, if you want to point out how a set of refactorings reduced the amount of code, a visual graph can sometimes be more compelling than just numbers.
I haven’t tried it out yet, but I’m curious to know about it’s performance. One of the StatCVS developers points out that the issue of gathering line counts is a tough one for Subversion. Apparently StatSVN does about the only thing possible and grabs files from the server to count lines, but that’s done out of necessity, not because it’s the wisest thing to do.
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[…] I started checking out StatSVN a few months ago, and have since been able to set it up for a couple of projects. I’ve got to say that the developers have been very helpful in resolving a couple of problems quickly, and have even gone and added some really interesting features, like a code churn report and a “heat map”. These are more intriguing than useful to me at the moment, but I like seeing them exploring what the data can show. […]
If you like StatSVN you should check out Fisheye from Cenqua (disclaimer: I work for Cenqua)
Michael,
Yes, I’ve looked over Fisheye a number of times, and have wished I worked for a client that was willing to pay for it
. For those places, though, that don’t or won’t go for it, some combination of StatSVN or StatCVS and ViewVC will give them a taste of what it means to mine their source repository.
Thanks,
John