Setting up Code Domains allows another layer of understanding and analysis to be applied to your repo. Once you've set up Code Domains, you can unlock a higher echelon of insight around the unique strengths of your developers. For example, if you're zooming into a developer's personal Domain Experts tab (under Issues -> Domain Experts), you might see something like this:
Combining Code Domains with your Developers' Code Domains tab page, the manager can ascertain which of their developers are most effective at writing different types of code, whether it be backend code (models, templates, scripts), front-end code (views, JavaScript, CSS), or something in between. Match Engineer strengths to issues that require those strengths, get more done, rinse and repeat. Managers can also view top Diff Delta getters in each code domain via the teamwide Domain Experts tab.
What's more, you can scope this visualization by repo, organization, or entity, so if you have a ticket that is going to require the best backend developer within a repo, or the best developer at writing tests in your entire company, Code Domains let you extract that information instantly.
linkSetting Up Code Domains
Code Domains can be defined at the entity, organization, or repo-level. If all of the repos within your entity or organization use comparable technologies (or follow similar conventions), we recommend defining Code Domains at the higher levels, so you don't have to do repetitive work setting them up in multiple repos. Code Domains are found as a tab on the left side of the screen after clicking the "Settings" tab in your main navigation:
There are two aspects to setting up Code Domains: choose what you want to categorize, and write a regular expression to identify files that fit into what you want to categorize. Let's dig deeper into each.
linkChoose Your Domains
By default, GitClear will auto-suggest a set of Code Domains for you, based on popular frameworks (e.g. Rails, Django) and languages (e.g. JavaScript, PHP, Python).
These cover most of the different specialties that engineers will focus on. Want to define a domain that isn't in the list? No problem. Just enter it into the Code Domain dropdown:
After clicking the "Create Code Domain" link, you're ready to start tracking which of your Engineers write the greatest volume of "Mobile" code.
linkDefine a Regular Expression
A regular expression is a special text string that describes a search pattern. For the purpose of using a regular expression to define your Code Domain, you simply need to identify some pattern to the files that comprise a given category. Following are some common examples of regular expressions that identify Code Domains.
Files that share a parent directory. If all of your view files are placed in subdirectories beneath a common parent directory, it's easy to use that parent directory as your regular expression. For example, if all of your view files (html, php templates, etc) fall in various subdirectories under a single "view" folder, then you can use the regular expression \/view\/ to match all of your project's view files.
Files whose name follows a convention. If all your files of a certain type have a shared element in their name, this can be used to identify the files as a Code Domain. For example, if all of your test files end in _test.rb (as is the case with most Ruby on Rails projects), then you can use the regular expression _test\.rb to define your "Test" Code Domain.
Files with a shared extension. If the files that comprise your Code Domain share one (or more) file extensions, you can use this to build a regular expression for them. For example, if you define a Code Domain named "JavaScript," you could define the regular expression as \.js. If your JavaScript files can end in different extensions, you can create multiple regular expressions that combine to feed the main "JavaScript" Code Domain.
Combination of directory and extension. Let's combine the first and third examples above to show a slightly more interesting case. For this example, let's say that want our "View" Code Domain to include all files in a subdirectory of "public" that end in ".js". To do this, you'd just use the wildcard operator, .*, in between the directory name and file extension. So: public\/.*\.js will do the trick, matching both the word "public" followed by a forward slash, then anything (the wildcard), then ending in ".js".
We give you a real-time snippet of which files are matching the regular expression you're experimenting with:
linkCopying Settings Between Repos
As mentioned above, you can define Code Domains for an organization or entity, and then remove individual repos from the full list of repos that fall in the higher-level scope:
Clicking the "X" in this case would stop the "Test" Code Domain from being applied to this repo where it matches zero files.
We also offer the means to copy Code Domain settings between repos. This option is available at the bottom of the Code Domain settings page if you're visiting in the scope of a repo.
linkWe're Here to Help!
Please feel free to email us at support@gitclear.com if you'd like for us to work with you to get these set up optimally for your needs.