Upsource Analytics: Activity Reports

Vladimir Kovalenko

You may have noticed that we have redesigned the Analytics section in Upsource 3.0 – the reports have become easier to use and more informative.

In this post you will learn how to read Analytics reports in Upsource and what they can tell you about the activity history in your projects.

Commit activity

The Commit Activity page features an overview of contribution activity in the project measured in the number of commits.

The top chart gives an idea of how the development pace in the project has been changing over time.

The detailed distribution of activity in any particular time period can be explored by selecting a time range in the chart.

You can see individual commit activity as well. The bigger the dot, the more commits a user has made in this time period. You can hover over the dots, usernames, or time markers to see these commits.

If the project model is available, there are more display options. For instance, when the “Show project modules” checkbox is enabled, the contribution distribution is displayed across project modules, rather than time periods.

This view can be particularly useful to get the general idea of the responsibility scopes of project developers, which is a valuable information for a new team member.

You can dig even deeper to understand what a particular developer does.

By selecting a user from the dropdown list of project’s committers above the chart, you can explore the distribution of their activity over both modules and time, and clearly see how their contribution context evolves over time. Such insight might be useful for a fellow developer or a manager who needs to know what their colleague has been working on.

The activity chart in this case only takes into account the commits made by the corresponding user. However, an option to display the total activity of all contributors in the same chart is also available.

Code Review Statistics

Another Analytics page is dedicated to overview of code review activity in the project.

With the upper chart, similar to the one in Commit Activity page, you can easily estimate how many changes, relative to the total activity, are covered with code reviews.

The statistics section below features the involvement of individual users into review process.

You can switch between the number of reviews and number of covered revisions to explore the contribution of each user to code review process both as an author of changes and as a reviewer.

This is a valuable information that helps understand who is mostly involved in reviewing the code, as well as whose changes get reviewed the most.

Statistics on number of comments is available as well.

To sum up, Upsource Analytics reports are not only a way to bate your curiosity about the past and present of your project with a bird’s eye look. They can also be used to support important team-wide decisions, should it concern the codebase ownership or review duties.

The next post will cover more reports that provide insight to hot spots and deep corners of the project. Stay tuned!