3.3.5. Activity Tracking#
A News Feed \(\neq\) history
Activity-tracking is a feature of remote service platforms and not a concept itself. “News Feeds” might contain parts of the history, but not vice-versa.
GitHub, GitLab, and other platforms offer activity tracking as part of their services to provide a full history of what happened, when it happened, and why it happened.
Key advantages:
Clarity and Transparency: understand what has been done in a repository, why and by whom, even after months or years.
Accountability and Responsibility: tracking who made changes and why makes it easier and faster to address problems.
Collaboration and Communication: the full history of changes ensures everyone is on the same page.
Continuous learning and preventing mistakes: with a record of every issue, change, and discussion, new users or future developers can look back and learn why certain decisions were made.
Gather Contextual Information: extending with contextual information facilitates the identification of a previous healthy state or breaking changes in dependencies.
Efficiency and Trust-Building: keep track of an open discussion directly where the changes are made, makes it easier to find information and builds trust.