Using Code-Swarms as a developer KPI

If You are developer in a company that doesn’t involve software development as its main product or line of business: Then you must be suffering from time to time about reporting your work and communicating the efforts you make as KPIs.

Everyone has to provide monthly ,dull and boring charts and tables KPIs showing the amount of work they did, begging for attention about their work.

Somehow developers lack the artistic and eye-catching way to present their work.

Well I propose to use “Code Swarms” to show your development effort in the projects you work on.

gourcing git project

Code Swarms is a way to visualize history of development in software projects. It mostly utilizes the data extracted from version control systems like CVS, SVN, GIT…etc and generates a Graph representing the project files and shows the in fast-forward chronograph video developers as they work on the different files of the project.

I Think it is more a publicity stunt rather than being actually a reliable KPI. You can use it to drag attention to your effort and to the project but I don’t really propose to use monthly or weekly.

There are many software that can generate those code swarms, but I found Gource to be a good free choice.

An example if you are using SVN:

1. Checkout the svn project normally in a separate directory:

   svn -co "svn://svn_server:svn_port/my-svn-project-path"

   cd my-svn-project

2. Generate an svn log in xml format:

   svn log -r 1:HEAD --xml --verbose --quiet > my-project-log.xml

3. Run gource to swarm the xml file:

gource my-project-log.xml

You should get something like this (without the music):

So Have fun with your coding.