kospex
Kospex is a CLI which aims to “look at the guts of your code” to help gain insights into your developers and technology landscape. It uses database structure from the excellent Mergestat lite to model data from git repositories.
Getting started
Follow our guide on Installation and setup
Also check out the list of commands that are part of the kospex toolkit.
If you are after some generally useful git commands then take a look at Useful Git commands
Key Use Cases and features
- Identify technology landscape
- Identify active developers (e.g. who’s had their code committer in the last 90 days)
- Identify key person or offboarding risk
- Identify potential complexity challenges (or conceptual integrity concerns)
- Aggregate repo metadata into a single database for easier and faster querying
General description of aging “things”
Many reports or commands generate a description of active, aging, stale or unmaintained. This description is a simple calculation based on give date using the following default rules.
| Description | Rule |
|---|---|
| Acitve | < 90 days |
| Aging | > 90 and < 180 days |
| Stale | > 180 and < 365 days |
| Unmaintained | > 365 days |
There are several places where this description may be used:
- On the last commit in a repo, to say it looks like it’s “aging”
- On a last updated date of package manager file, where we’d expect them to be updated monthly to quarterly
- On the release date of a package or libraries we’re using.
It’s possibly that something labelled “unmaintained” is feature complete and doesn’t require changes. However, generally there are any external dependencies, a code or library usually needs a change a couple of times a year.
Thoughts and articles
“What are orphaned repos?” take a look at some basics of knowledge loss and the challenges.
“Are security vulnerabilities an indicator of development testing practices?”
What is a kospex?
We’re aiming to [k]now your c[o]de by in[spe]cting the haruspe[x]. From Wikipedia, The Latin terms haruspex and haruspicina are from an archaic word, hīra = “entrails, intestines”
So we’re going to help look at the “guts of your code” to gain an understanding of the applications, technology landscape (sprawl?) and developers.