While metrics never give the whole picture, they sure help ask interesting questions. For instance, I hooked up CVSMonitor to the repository for my current project, and this was the result:
| Author | Karma | Commits | Added | Removed | Change |
| agreen | 149,483 | 226 | 47,416 | 47,259 | 157 |
| dpinn | 130,282 | 272 | 64,135 | 24,033 | 40,102 |
On the face of it, I've taken away as much code as I've added, leaving David to do all the work. We kicked around a few other hypotheses as well, but overall it reflects the fact that I've worked on some difficult components - like the printing subsystem, which I had five goes at before I hit on a combination of technologies that works reliably.
CVSMonitor has plenty of other tricks too, including finding changesets and allocating blame.
Comments
Have you tried out Cenqua's FishEye (http://cenqua.com/fisheye/)? It looks like it overlaps (a lot!) the features of CVSMonitor. I'm sure the price difference (FishEye is commercial) is important when it comes to these tools.
And hell, why are you still using CVS? Get a *real* version control system, or at least something that can track changes to directory names! Maybe even do proper branching and semi-automated three-way diff/merges... Look at Subversion (http://subversion.tigris.org/) or GNU arch (http://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-arch/) for examples of the future of (free) version control :).