[bjarneh]

It is super useful. We started a project with some hired consultants about a year ago. Did not engage much with that project, but when I was recently asked to get back into the loop and find out what these people had been up to, a quick view of the 'gource' visualization was all that was needed in order to know who was doing stuff, and how much they had been working on it etc. At least I knew who was just attending the meetings, and who was actually coding and so on :-)

[lucianbr]

Isn't this the same thing as measuring developer productivity by number of lines of code or commits, pushes and such?

[bjarneh]

It certainly isn't an alternative to actually digging into the repo and find out what has happened. But I wanted to find out something about:

1. How many developers have actually been working on this stuff

2. Has the guy who set up the wire-frame actually stepped back

3. Are there more developers doing stuff, then what we get the impression of, based on the weekly Teams meetings

All of these questions could be answered in 1 minute by starting 'gource' + increase the speed of the visualization for the past year. I was afraid that this newly hired consulting company was pretending to use less resources then they actually did, in order to sink their hooks into our company, which I could see instantly that they had been doing. I could also see that the "big gun" setting up the wire frame for the project, had not really been taken of the project at all, but had been helping some of the jr. devs all along. Something that would have taken some digging with 'git log' or 'tig'..

[sbarre]

More or less, but OP didn't say it was the only measure used.

Just like LOCs and commits, it's a starting point. A general indicator of where you need to dig deeper or who to prioritize in your review.

[bjarneh]

Exactly, it's a very quick way to get an overview. Just by looking at how many developers have been working on things + their frequency of committing code is very helpful. Tons of files appearing at once is a quick give away that something is either copied from another project, or some massive "technology" (read: library, framework) is added; which can be hard to maintain unless the stuff being added is very mature.

[whateveracct]

It is sadly. And unfortunately, it's still a commonplace measure even at the "best" companies.

They say "oh it's not the only measure" ofc. Anything to downplay it to ICs. But then you chat with your jaded manager and you hear echoes of the insanity that goes on in performance review calibration and you aren't so sure about those qualifiers anymore..