StatCVS offers a view into CVS repository activity: " been running for a few years. How do you get an understanding of the project's development history? The best way is probably to just talk to the programmers involved, but that's easier said than done. They've often moved on to other projects and can be hard to track down. You can look at the release frequency, although that may be governed by a nontechnical mandate (something along the lines of, 'We'll do a release only after the end of the fiscal year'). You can poke around the bug and feature-request trackers, dredging up discussions on bugs opened and closed. Or you can go right to the source code history and use a utility like StatCVS to see what changes have been made and who made them. I've used StatCVS for several years on various large projects, and the reports it generates have always been well received. In this article, "


aaah metrics... how to get good metrics... this is a good way to get a lines of code count. but you need to add in complexity counts... since a few lines of sql is far more complex then some java code.