Neil’s point-free blog

One problem that startup companies often have is demonstrating to investors that they’re actually doing something productive rather than just pouring away money on office plants, Herman Miller chairs, and playing foosball all day. The best thing you can do is to release your product early and then keep improving it every few weeks, and this works well if you’re working on a web application. Unfortunately not all products are amenable to being released piecemeal. Sometimes it just isn’t done until it’s done.

One thing you can do instead is show the evolution of your code over a period of time using a tool like StatSVN, which inspects your Subversion repository and generates graphs showing:

1. Total lines of code over time
2. Lines of code per developer
3. Activity by day of week and hour of day
4. File count and average file size
5. A hierarchical “heatmap” showing the sizes of files and the amount of change in those files over the previous 30 days.

Your potential “angels” will be able to see your dedication to the project. The late nights and the lost weekends are right there on the activity graphs… as obvious to them as your pallid complexion, broken marriage and kids who don’t remember what [Mummy|Daddy] looks like any more.

As a demonstration, the StatSVN website recently started generating charts for several popular open source projects such as Apache Ant, the Ruby language, and Subversion itself. You can see the charts here. As a sneak previw, here is the LOC-per-author chart for Ruby:

… which shows that Matz (the cyan line at the top) is truly the God of Ruby. I hope Mrs Matsumoto is understanding. Compare this with an apparently much more democratic project such as Apache QPid:

Finally, take a look at Spring Rich Client, which seems to go through occasional Stalinist purges of its codebase. Watch out, these guys take no prisoners!