Manage Projects

A large organization might have hundreds of CodeScene projects. This section explains how you get an overview of those projects, see which one’s are the most active, and where most active authors reside. You use this information to identify inactive projects that can be removed safely in order to keep license costs down. Let’s start by explaining how CodeScene’s license model works.

What’s an Active Author?

CodeScene’s license is based on the number of active contributors. An active contributor is anyone who has committed code over the past three months to the codebases you want to analyse. This time period is a sliding window that always starts at the date of the most recent commit in your repositories. CodeScene applies the following additional rules:

  • Each author is only counted once. That is, if you analyze multiple codebases, the same persons only count once no matter how many projects they contribute to.

  • Historic contributors are free. People who haven’t committed code within the last three months are included for free and don’t add to the license fee.

You can get a rough estimate on the number of active authors in a Git repository through the following command:

git shortlog -sn --after=2018-07-01

Note that you want to replace the –after date with a date that’s three months back from where you are now.

How do I monitor Project Activity and Active Authors?

The aggregated number of active authors is shown in the footer on CodeScene’s start page, as shown in Fig. 251.

Active author count

Fig. 251 The number of active authors is shown in the footer on the front page.

In addition, CodeScene comes with a project activity view. If you login as an admin, you can inspect the project usage activity as shown in Fig. 252.

Project usage activity

Fig. 252 A summary of the project usage activity in CodeScene.

This view lets you identify inactive projects that haven’t been accessed in a long time (2-3 months), and safely delete them to keep the active author count down and maybe save some licensing fees in the process; Although we’re admittedly happy the more users you have, we also want the licensing to be fair. So we recommend that you inspect the project usage regularly.