Over a project's lifespan, it's common for developers to commit code under different names, like Jane Doe, jdoe, or J.Doe. This can be a source of inaccuracies for CodeScene’s social analysis tools.
To deal with this, CodeScene provides an interface that allows you to specify the version-control names that correspond with real people. Each developer has one or more aliases, while team membership, exclusions, and contributor status apply to the author.
To ensure CodeScene understands who wrote the code, use alias mapping to group all known identities under a single developer profile.
This interface lets you link multiple aliases to the same person, ensuring more accurate social analysis and a unified view of the author's contributions.
The Alias-Mapping Interface
- Accessing the tool
To access the interface, go to the Developer Identity Mapping tab within the Teams/Developers settings for the relevant project.
- Understanding the panels
- LEFT PANEL - shows a list of all current authors.
After you choose the author you want to work on. This is the name that you want to keep. On the right, a new list will appear.
- RIGHT PANEL - Displays all version-control aliases associated with the selected developer.
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Merging Aliases
- Use the Filter aliases box to search for aliases.
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- You can use regular expressions.
- Whitespace acts as a logical OR (e.g., janedoe j.doe matches both).
- Once you've found the alias or aliases you're looking for, select them on the right.
- Click Stage changes to prepare them for merging.
In this example, we merge the aliases 'Calvin' and 'Calvin Buckley,' which updates the author list on the left. You can then continue making changes or click Submit at the top to complete the process.
Separating aliases from their authors
If you want, you can always separate these aliases from the author that we assigned them to. To do this, we select the corresponding checkbox and click on Stage changes.
After clicking Submit, the separated aliases become new authors. Since these are treated as new identities, any group membership, former contributor, or exclusion status will be lost. Merging and unmerging aliases results in some data loss.
Renaming authors
Since an Author is distinct from their version-control aliases, you can rename an author without affecting how CodeScene identifies them in analyses. To rename, select the author from the left column and click the Edit name link next to their name on the right.
When you run a new analysis, the new name will appear in the analysis results.