Student Guide¶
Welcome to the GitPulse student guide. This section will help you understand how GitPulse works, what the system tracks, and how to effectively use the dashboard information.
Guide Contents¶
Understanding Metrics¶
What compliance rules R01-R13 mean and how they affect your evaluation.
What is GitPulse?¶
GitPulse is a tool supporting DevOps education that automatically analyzes your work in GitLab projects. The system tracks:
- Commit activity - regularity and work distribution over time
- Issue management - creating, assigning, and closing tasks
- Merge requests - code review and code integration
- CI/CD pipeline - automated testing and deployment
- Team collaboration - work distribution among team members
GitPulse is not a surveillance tool
GitPulse only analyzes publicly available data from your GitLab projects. It does not track your personal activity, record your screen, or monitor time spent at the computer. The system evaluates team collaboration outputs, not individual productivity.
How does it work?¶
flowchart LR
S["You"] -->|"commit, issue, MR"| GL["GitLab"]
GL -->|"webhook"| GP["GitPulse"]
GP -->|"analysis"| D["Dashboard"]
D -->|"metrics"| T["Teacher"]- You work in GitLab - creating commits, issues, merge requests
- GitPulse automatically syncs data from your projects
- The dashboard displays compliance metrics and activity overview
- The instructor uses this data as input for evaluation
Important Notes¶
Gaming detection
GitPulse includes detection of artificial metric inflation (gaming). The system can identify patterns such as:
- Empty commits or commits without meaningful changes
- Copying code between files to inflate line counts
- Creating and immediately closing issues
- Self-merge without code review
Such behavior is automatically penalized and reported to the instructor.
Best practices
- Work regularly, not just before deadlines
- Use meaningful commit messages
- Break work into smaller tasks via issues
- Use merge requests for code review
- Set up and maintain a CI/CD pipeline