Understanding commit lists

Each Git repository that is registed on Team Feedback comes with a list of commits. These lists contain all important information that Team Feedback holds about a Git repository. If you have any concerns about the statistics and charts that Team Feedback produces, the commit list provides a view on the data that is used to compute these statistics and charts. It should be your first point of call to seek an explanation.

Below is a fragment of a sample commit list:

The remainder of this page explains all the information in the table.

Row shading

Unmarked row	This commit could be attributed to a team member (and participants in a collaborative coding session). The commit itself and the line changes are accounted for in team and relevant individual charts and statistics.
Yellow row	The person who created this commit could not be identified because Team Feedback does not recognise the login or email associated with this commit. This commit will contribute towards the team's statistics but not to anyone's individual commits. Under Committer/Participant, you can find the login and/or email associated with the commit. The commit can be identified if the email is registered with your profile or if you link the commit's login to your Team Feedback account.
Red row	This commit is deemed to be an outlier commit. Normally, commits are treated as outliers if the number of line changes in this commit is too high. Commits can also be classed as outliers if they appear to stem from extensive code removal or copying of code. This commit will contribute to statistics and charts that count commit. However, it is excluded from statistics and charts that count line changes.

Type of commit

	This commit is the first commit of the repository (i.e. it has no parent commit).
	This is a regular commit with one parent (or previous commit). The number of line changes of this commit corresponds to the number of line added or removed relative to the parent/previous commit.
	This is a merge commit with two parents. Irrespective of whether the merge could be committed automatically or required some conflict resolution, the numbers of added/removed lines always equal 0.

Timestamp and message

The timestamp is the date and time the commit was created (i.e., when the git commit command was performed and not when the commit was pushed). The message is associated with the commit at the time the commit is created. This information is retrieved from the remote repository and not changed.

Committer and participants

The committer is the person to created the commit.

When the git commit command is executed, Git associates an email address with the commit. This email address ought to be set before making any commits using the git config command — it should be the primary email address of your GitHub account. GitHub associates this email address with a userid.

If you failed to set the correct email address, GitHub will not be able to associate a user with the commits that were made. Team Feedback will try to identify the team member who made a commit with unidentified committer. If it is not able to do this, the email address, and any userid associated with the commit are displayed under committer and participants.

If a committer can be identified for the commit, and this committer has registered a collaborative coding session that started before and ended after the commit's timestamp, then this commit will be attributed to all participants in the collaborative coding session. The participants are identified in the participants columnn.

Branch

The branch of a commit is the branch in which the commit resides in the latest version of the code. If a commit is made in a branch and that branch is later merged with the default branch (or master branch), that commit will be registered as being part of the latter.

In stats?

The "In stats?" column indicates whether whether then line change counts of this commit contribute to statistics and charges.

	The green check mark indicates that this is deemed to be a normal commit and the line changes listed for this commit contribute to team and individual statistics and charts.
	The red cross mark indicates that this is deemed to be an outlier commit and the line changes listed for this commit do not contribute to team and individual statistics and charts. A commit may be marked as an outlier by Team Feedback or by a module instructor.

Lines

All commits, except merge commits, specify the number of line changes associated with this commit. Line changes are represented as +x -y, which indicates that the commit corresponds to x line additions, y line deletions and x+y line changes.