Waydev - Git analytics (2018) version 1.0

I agree with what folks like Peter and James are saying. Lines of code and commit count are not accurate ways to measure "impact." Usually a high frequency of commits is an indication of poor code quality -- developers are introducing new changes to fix errors introduced by previous ones. Instead, you should expect a steady cadence of incremental changes, where proper time and thought is put into each. Test coverage is another important metric, which is not covered here. Further, most product-development organizations celebrate when developers remove lines of code. We, for example, have a bot that adds a "hand clapping" emoji to a commit when the developer has removed code. In short, a high commit volume and more lines of code are often anathema to what good software development is.

I'm usually not one to go for negative reviews, but:

What is the "Impact" metric?

The metric you need to watch, week-by-week. At Waydev, we developed the "Impact" metric to analyze performance data. Impact takes the following into consideration: (1) The highest chunk of activity you did in the past, (2) The average activity of a developer based on our research and (3) The behavior of your activity in the last weeks.

"Activity" is not the same thing as impact. Teaching 'non-technical founders' that those two things are even remotely related sounds like a great way to undermine your team's actual impact. You don't want devs to blindly ram out and submit code. You want them to come up with smart, scaleable and effective ways to tackle issues and resolve challenges.

Pros:

I'm sure they mean well

Cons:

The core 'impact' metric doesn't signify actual impact and 'trains' non-devs on the wrong KPI's

If you don't trust your technical team to execute the product vision and present you ongoing results, it's not time for a new tool, it's time for a new technical team.

Pros:

Unclear

Cons:

Utilizes specious metrics for "Impact"

What an amazing product, I'll make sure to give it a try! 😍

I've been using Waydev for a while now and I love it! It's easier when you have an overview on your team's activity

Pros:

easy to use, clear metrics

Cons:

still looking for them

Really cool product and product team. Good luck!

Amazing product! Just wondering how secure the data storage is?

Hey guys, looks interesting. Let me ask a simple question to understand it a bit better - what exactly is the impact score and how is it calculated?

Nice work, @alex_circei & team! I'm curious - How is Waydev free?

"Helping non-technical founders understand what's going on with their technical team" is a fantastic objective and well worth the effort - and this is why you're getting consistently positive early feedback from prospective non-technical founder customers. Unfortunately, counting SLOC and/or commits, *no matter how sophisticated your algorithm,* is a fundamentally flawed means of assessing either "what's going on" with a technical team or "how well are they doing," and this is why you're receiving consistently critical feedback from senior technical folks. The big problem you have is that your non-technical customers will eventually encounter the bad outcomes driven by a "how much stuff did I do" measurement approach, and when they do, they will be really angry with you because you will have effectively been lying to them for an extended period of time. *Non-technical founders: please don't ever measure software teams on how much stuff they did. It will make you very, very unhappy in the end.* Digging deeper, this is not a matter of "well what if we analyze the data better?" The problem is that the only real way to measure the impact of a technical team is in their ability to deliver value - and value is not encoded anywhere within any software repo, whether CVS, SVN, git, MTFS, BitBucket, or any other repo management tool. Period. If you want to measure value, you have no choice but to measure against requirements or user stories in some way.