Essential Contributor Analysis

The Essential Contributor Analysis (ECA) identifies all engineers who have developed the software, the components to which they have contributed, the extent of their contributions, and their relationship to the company (part or full-time employee, former employee, consultant, contractor, etc.).  The answers to the following questions reveal the ECA’s strong value proposition.

In addition to identifying key contributors, the rich trove of data produced by the ECA enables numerous additional insights such as:

• Over what timeframe have each of the contributors been working with the code base?
• How has the mix of contributors changed since the company was formed?  In the past year?
• Have developers had lapses or surges in activity over time?
• How has team size and activity evolved over time?
• When were components of the software developed? 
• How have the components with the most activity evolved over time? How stable are they?
• How much of the critical, IP-heavy software has been contributed by contractors, part-time or former employees?  
• How much activity has been expended in developing test automation?
• Has there been a suspicious surge of activity in the months leading up to this due diligence process?

ECA data has even been used to discover the evolution of critical software functions with serious design flaws.

In addition to the documented analysis and charts in the Do Diligence® report, we deliver the following Excel workbooks that allow examination of the data behind the analysis in any way desired.

• Activity by Week 
• Contributor by Component 
• Developer Activity