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Code Churn Excel Report

With the Code Churn report, you can analyze how source files are changing over time. This report shows how many lines of code the team added, deleted, or modified during the most recent four weeks.

For information about how to access this report, see Excel Reports (Agile).

Note

You can view the Code Churn report from the Quality dashboard. You can access this dashboard only if your team project portal has been enabled and is provisioned to use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. For more information, see Access a Team Project Portal or Process Guidance.

In this topic

Related topics

  • Data in the Report

  • Interpreting the Report

  • Customizing the Report

Required Permissions

To view the report, you must be assigned or belong to a group that has been assigned the Read permissions in SharePoint Products for the team project.

To modify or customize the report, you must be a member of the TfsWarehouseDataReaders security role in SQL Server Analysis Services. You must also be assigned or belong to a group that has been assigned the Members permissions in SharePoint Products for the team project. For more information, see Grant Access to the Databases of the Data Warehouse for Visual Studio ALM and Managing Permissions.

Data in the Report

The team can review the Code Churn report to determine how volatile the code base is and how many lines of code were modified in the previous week. As the following illustration shows, the report provides a stacked area graph of the lines of code that the team added, deleted, or modified in the most recent four weeks.

Code Churn Report

This report is based on a PivotChart report that shows the most recent four weeks of data that were captured for code changes and that is stored in the data warehouse. All lines are counted, even lines that contain comments or that are blank.

Required Activities for Tracking Code Churn

For the Code Churn report to be useful and accurate, team members must perform the following activities:

Interpreting the Report

Code churn is a good measure to quantify the amount of change that is occurring in your project. In general, high levels of code churn indicate a less stable project. You should expect high rates of code churn at the start of a product cycle or when the team has implemented many changes. Toward the end of an iteration or before a release, you should expect the level of code churn to decrease, which indicates that your project is more stable.

You can review the Code Churn report to answer these questions:

  • How much of the code is the team testing?

  • Is the team testing enough of the code?

  • Based on the code coverage and test metrics, is the team likely to meet target goals?

For more information about how code churn affects quality, see Quality Dashboard (Agile).

Customizing the Report

You can customize the Code Churn report by opening it in Office Excel and changing the filter options or a column field list for the PivotTable report. You can modify the report to support other views as the following table describes.

View

Action

Code churn for an iteration

Change the filter for Iteration (default=All)

Code churn for a product area

Change the filter for Area (default=All)

Code churn for the most recent six, eight, or more weeks

In the Columns PivotTable Field List, replace @@Last 4 weeks@@ with a different Set

For more information about how to work with and customize PivotTable and PivotChart reports, see the following pages on the Microsoft Web site:

See Also

Concepts

Quality Dashboard (Agile)

Build Quality Indicators Report

Other Resources

Excel Reports (Agile)