Using Data to understand behavior - Part 2
by Eing Ong
Another good use of data is to understand behavior in order to identify what we need to correct. If engineers are taking a longer time to understand, fix and add new code to a code base, it could be that the code has low code coverage, poor documentation and many other code smells. One other issue is much of the code is orphaned and there is no owner for a long time. Learning such code without unit tests, documentation or any engineer who is familiar with the code can be an issue.
How orphaned is your code base
I wanted to find out how much code is orphaned, i.e. has not be modified for past 2, 3, 4 and 5 years. This code base is in P4 and I could use “p4 fstat -T headModTime {filename}” command to find the last modified time. Here’s the script.
cd ${project_workspace}
# Be sure you have these configured
# P4HOSTNAME=
# P4CLIENT=
# P4USER=
# P4PORT=
# find last modified time of all java files
find . -name "*.java" -exec p4 fstat -T headModTime {} >> headModTime \;
# remove any blank lines
awk 'NF > 0' headModTime > headModTimeBlankLinesRemoved
# last check-in is 1 or more years ago
awk 'BEGIN { FS = " " }; { if ($3 < 1425769728) print $3 }' headModTimeBlankLinesRemoved > headModTime1YearOrMore
# last check-in is 2 or more years ago
awk 'BEGIN { FS = " " }; { if ($3 < 1394233728) print $3 }' headModTimeBlankLinesRemoved > headModTime2YearOrMore
# last check-in is 3 or more years ago
awk 'BEGIN { FS = " " }; { if ($3 < 1362697728) print $3 }' headModTimeBlankLinesRemoved > headModTime3YearOrMore
# last check-in is 4 or more years ago
awk 'BEGIN { FS = " " }; { if ($3 < 1331161728) print $3 }' headModTimeBlankLinesRemoved > headModTime4YearOrMore
# last check-in is 5 years ago
awk 'BEGIN { FS = " " }; { if ($3 < 1299539330) print $3 }' headModTimeBlankLinesRemoved > headModTime5YearOrMore
# get line count for each year
echo Number of files not modified in last 1 year:
wc -l headModTime1Year
echo Number of files not modified in last 2 year:
wc -l headModTime2Year
echo Number of files not modified in last 3 year:
wc -l headModTime3Year
echo Number of files not modified in last 4 year:
wc -l headModTime4Year
echo Number of files not modified in last 5 year:
wc -l headModTime5Year
# get total number of java files
echo Total number of java files
find . -name '*.java' | xargs cat | wc -l
Here’s how you can get the timestamps for past 5 years.
# 1 years ago timestamp
$ date -j -f "%m%d%Y" 03072015 "+%s"
1425769728
# 2 years ago timestamp
$ date -j -f "%m%d%Y" 03072014 "+%s"
1394233728
# 3 years ago timestamp
$ date -j -f "%m%d%Y" 03072013 "+%s"
1362697728
# 4 years ago timestamp
$ date -j -f "%m%d%Y" 03072012 "+%s"
1331161728
# 5 years ago timestamp
$ date -j -f "%m%d%Y" 03072011 "+%s"
1299539330
# timestamp to date lookup
$ date -r 1299539330
Mon Mar 7 15:08:50 PST 2011
Other good blogs
Last but not least, this week I had the opportunity to meet with Marty, Drew & Bill from AKF partners. Their blogs and books are highly regarded in the industry. They have a few blogs on using data as metrics as well -
Selecting metrics for your Agile teams
Finally, I’ll leave you with the good ol’ quote “You can’t improve what you don’t measure”, use the right data to drive change and behavior to achieve the outcome.
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