Rob Smyth

Wednesday 3 June 2009

Developer Continuous Integration Visibility

I wonder if it would be useful to measure individual developer commit rate (say over last day) and display this on a screen alongside a teams story board, or in its area. This metric gives an indication if a developer is in trouble and has gone 'stale'. Happens to me some days :-).

Of course all days are not equal and some days can be dominated by non-coding work. Hence the reason for placing the monitor next to the story board so it becomes useful information during stand-up (if the team does that kind of stuff). So a team member can report ... "yesterday I was distracted by administrative tasks so you can see my commit rate was low". Great to raise the visibility on this kind of stuff.

Perhaps the screen could look something like this ...
In a team using CI I often find a drop of commit rate as an early indicator that somebody needs help (sometimes me!).

2 comments:

Duncan Bayne said...

Rob,

Did you use a specific tool to generate that graph? If not, I think I'm going to have to write one.

(And yes, that is how long it takes me to clear my backlog of starred Google Reader items ...)

Rob Smyth said...

Hi Duncan!

I used SmartDraw, so it is a fake (kinda).