Announcing Hourly Line Impact

Today marks the launch of a feature we've been looking forward to since we started building GitClear: a graph that illustrates how the output of a team or committer fluctuates over the course of an average work week! Here's the Hourly Line Impact of Alloy (our company) during the past year:

What can we spot in regards to team productivity?

• There's negligible work happening before 8am or on the weekends
• Wednesday -- our weekly "Work from Home" day -- doesn't glow as hot during the morning as an office day, but our team compensates for that by stretching the day longer than any office day (exactly how flexible schedules are supposed to work)
• Friday goes dark starting between 3-4pm, and gets very dark at 4-5pm. This is when we have our weekly company meeting.
• Days are generally darker between 12-1pm -- but not much darker. Our team doesn't see much of a dropoff for lunch

This same graph can be compared to any individual developer. Here's mine for the past year:

One element not apparent until mousing over the cells in a live graph: the first row of cells includes all activity that happened before 8am in your time zone, and the final row includes all activity that happened after 5pm in your time zone. So my bright cell on the final row isn't so much for 5-6pm, but for all of the work I sneak in around 10pm on many nights (incorrigible...).

The dark spots on my week (Monday morning, much of Thursday) are where I tend to squeeze in email responses.

We look forward to hearing what insights our customers will take from this new chart... it's chalk full of explanation around what's happening on your team. Find it under the "Team" tab (for showing aggregation of full team), or the "Stats" tab if you want to see the graph for a single developer.

A note on impact calculation methodology: the method that ascribes Line Impact to each cell is wise enough to understand a commit that spans many hours applies equally across the time it was being authored. So if you made a commit at 10am, and then at 2pm made a commit worth 100 LI, that would count as 25 LI each to 10-11am, 11-12pm, 12-1pm, and 1-2pm.

Bill Harding

Founder and CEO, GitClear

Bill is driven by the challenge of how best to quantify valuable questions that defy quantification. It's possible this instinct may have been awakened in Bill at age 14, when he won a soft, stuffed bunny at the orthodontist for guessing the number of jelly beans in the gumball machine.