Future Changes and Improvements

[noorbuchi]

Hi everyone, thank you all for your work on this project! While we have a partly functioning tool at the moment, there are still some enhancements that would make the tool more user-friendly. In addition to completing and merging the remaining pull requests, I added a list of suggestions and potential changes that we should take into consideration moving forward. Please feel free to work on an item that has not been completed yet. You can also comment on this issue if you feel like we should add another item to the list.

Currently needed fixes:

• CLI
  • Handle for empty and duplicate input in the merge duplicates, as well as non-existent keys
  • Switch order of calculating additional metrics to after the duplicates have been merged
  • Add a command that would clear previously populated JSONs and start over, or skip directly into calculations
  • Optional, add progress bar using a plugin such as Progress
• Data Processing
  • Remove percentage of contribution for metrics like ratio, files, formats, issues, and PR. Instead, show the value of the ratio, and the number of files, formats, issues, and PR contributed to.
  • Write percentage of contribution dictionary to a JSON file so WebInterface team can read from it directly
• Web Interface
  • Organize the percentage of contribution data in a table and display it in the web interface
  • Optional: use one large page for calculations rather than a side option for each metric separately
  • Optional: Move the process of merging duplicate usernames to the web interface
  • Optional: Try to find other types of graphs that would show a better representation of the data, for example, pie charts, bar charts where every user is a column/slice of the graph.
  • Add the percentage of contribution for pull requests and issues information to the bar graph.
  • Optional: Collect dates of commits and add them to json file, figure out json incompatibility issues
  • Optional: Use collected commit dates to create a timeline of the users' commits

[Jordan-A]

@noorbuchi I think it's a great idea to improve the cogitate_tool, and I like the features that you have suggested. Especially the progress bar! I think that I will be working on the Data Processing features soon. At the moment I can't think of any other features that we can add. I'll let you know if any come to mind!

[noorbuchi]

@Jordan-A I'm glad you agree with these changes. The progress bar has already been added to the CLI branch, which is waiting for some minor changes before merging. I recommend that you check out that branch and let us know about any changes that you want to see in the future.

[Jordan-A]

@noorbuchi Will do!

[stephensonc]

Currently, it seems like we collect the issue and pull request data, but do not include it in the report. I think that a future change would be to incorporate issues/prs and metrics associated with them, given that we have the data in the json.

[noorbuchi]

@stephensonc I also think that these are good changes to add in the future. We collect the issues and pull requests information, but we only display their number through the web interface. We can hopefully work in this later on after discussing if we want to continue supporting this tool. Thanks for the suggestion.