I was having a talk with a friend about project health, and suggested using the logs from Subversion, a source code version control tool, as a crude indicator of project activity.
I got curious and found some tools that can plot some nice graphs for us. I tried StatSVN which was very simple to set up. Just get the log file from the repository and feed it to the plot tool. Let it run, and it will calculate lots of useful information from all the metadata stored in the Subversion log.
Here are some interesting graphs that it generated:
This graph plots lines of code vs. time. I think it shows a very healty activity around the project. A slow start, where I mostly thought about design and researched new techniques, followed by some good ol’ coding.
This one plots file count vs. time. I actually had no idea that there were some many files but I’m not surprised. I create new files for every new separate concept introduced in the engine, so it makes sense there are so many files.
Now let’s hope that in some months from now, I can generate the plots again and reach the same conclutions.
