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Code Changes Commits

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

Overview

Code Changes Commits measures changes to the source code over a specific period, where a "change" represents an atomic modification made by developers, typically in the form of a commit. Each data point corresponds to a commit that alters files considered part of the source code. This metric helps in assessing the health and sustainability of a project by providing insights into developers activity. A higher volume of code changes indicates active development, maintenance, and responsiveness to bugs or features. However, the metric alone doesn’t capture code quality or the significance of each change. Monitoring contributions across teams can help highlight engagement disparities, ensuring all community members are equally involved in the development process of each project.

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Data Collection Strategies

Specific description: Git

Mandatory parameters (for Git):

  • Date type. Either author date or committer date. Default: author date. For each git commit, two dates are kept: when the commit was authored, and when it was committed to the repository. For deciding on the period, one of them has to be selected.
  • Include merge commits. Boolean. Default: True. Merge commits are those which merge a branch, and in some cases are not considered as reflecting a coding activity.
  • Include empty commits. Boolean. Default: True. Empty commits are those which do not touch files, and in some cases are not considered as reflecting a coding activity.

Filters

  • By actors (author, committer). Requires actor merging (merging ids corresponding to the same author).
  • By groups of actors (employer, gender...). Requires actor grouping, and likely, actor merging.
  • By tags (used in the message of the commits). Requires a structure for the message of commits. This tag can be used in an open-source project to communicate to every contributors if the commit is, for example, a fix for a bug or an improvement of a feature.
  • Count per month over time
  • Count per group over time

Visualizations


References

Contributors

  • Elizabeth Barron
  • Georg Link
  • Matt Germonprez
  • Peculiar C Umeh

Additional Information

To edit this metric please submit a Change Request here

To reference this metric in software or publications please use this stable URL: https://chaoss.community/?p=4707

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