Bit #2: How to Report on Weekly Development

January 29, 2018

Note: This is an updated blog post from 2014.

Since it’s not always possible to practice “pair programming” when I’m in a mentoring situation, I have found it necessary to regularly report on and archive a list of all development that was performed, so that I can quickly review the high level details of what was done.

To this end, I have found a quick method to create a report on what has changed in an environment each week. You can grab my update set “Development Report 1.0” from ShareNow, or follow the steps below for a simple explanation of how to create your very own version.

Installing Development Report 1.0

  1. Head over to ShareNow to download the update set.
  2. Go to Retrieved Update Sets in your instance and use the link at the bottom “Import Update Set from XML”.
  3. Preview, and then commit the update set.
  4. Go to the groups table, and add yourself and any other interested admins to the “Development Report Recipients” group.
  5. Go look in the Scheduled Jobs table and modify when the “Weekly Development Report” sends out to suit your needs.

Creating your own Report

  1. In the left hand navigation search, type “sys_update_xml.list”
  2. If you’ve typed that in correctly, you should see a list of all the development records in the system pop up.
    NOTE: DO NOT MODIFY OR DELETE THESE RECORDS!
  3. Right click on the table header, and select “Bar Chart”.
  4. Expand the report header, and modify the report type to “List”, add a filter to restrict the list to the dates that you’re interested in, and then set the “Group By” field to be “Updated By”.
  5. Modify the fields showing in the report to include “Updated”, and remove “Created”.
  6. Make the report sort by “Updated” DESC.
  7. Note that it’s important to use Updated instead of Created, because month or year old records will get updated as you modify an already existing business rule, etc.

Other Uses

In addition to mentoring new developers, this type of report can also be very helpful to provide an audit trail of development, or to watch for any unsanctioned development occurring directly in a production instance.

When you combine this with Developer Search 2.0, you have a solid base for investigating problems that crop up on large development projects.