How can I see who in my team are writing the most code and who is writing the least using TFS?

Question

I am having a problem with one of my team members output. He seems to be always 'busy' yet I am unable to see exactly what code he has done and he seems be delivering very little and it seems to take a long time to do so. I'd like to investigate further using TFS and was wondering if there is any functionality in TFS that shows what has been written by an individual or similar?

Just to clarify I am NOT spying I am trying to resolve situation. This is only a starting point. I un derstand that quantity of code does not equate to best programmer

thanks for any answers

Answer 1

While I am away from TFS right now, you can view a list of checkins by user in Team Explorer, and in each of these you can see the files which have been changed and look at the diffs for each.

Answer 2

You can get this from the TFS Cube, if you have it set up. There are a large number of dimensions within Code Churn. Some of this is also available in the TfsWarehouse database as well.

If you do have the cube set up, just point Excel at it and have some fun playing around. Keep in mind, though, that the numbers can point you in the wrong direction. Use discretion.

Answer 3

For me the simplest thing is to set up email alerts for checkins. You get the checkin comment, some work item info assuming they are associating/resolving on checkin, and list of changed files, as they happen. Lets you see what part of the code that dev is in and after a while you get a sense when "it's quiet. Too quiet" because someone isn't checking in. It doesn't take the place of forensics of what he did all month, but it keeps me feeling connected. It also gives me intuitive feelings like "he's in the reports, so I'll be able to show those to the user earlier in the cycle" or "jeez, he's doing all the stupid typos in error messages and other no-thinking things, and not tackling his real hard stuff" or even "he's doing his pri 2 stuff while he has a large pile of pri 1". All of these enable a 30 second hallway conversation to deliver a course correction as close in time to the problem as possible.

Answer 4

Your best programmer may in fact write less code than your worst programmer, in fact really good programmers often write less code. Be careful about using this information to evaluate performance. Since you are using TFS, I assume you are also using the work item tracking. That is really a better way to evaluate performance than using lines of code. See which checkins cause the most problems, which fix the most defects, and how many rounds it takes for something to be truly fixed.

Answer 5

See the following blog post I put together a while ago:

• Getting Started with the TFS Data Warehouse

This one talks you through getting code churn for each area of your codebase, but it would be easy to add team members into that as well to get a breakdown by team member who did the check-in.

But I agree with your question - this is not a good way to check on the productivity of your colleague. Instead I would talk with them to raise your concerns.