Active Authors Explained

How Active Authors are calculated

CodeScene’s subscription model uses the number of active contributors as the main criteria.

An active author is anyone who has committed code over the past three months to the codebase you want to analyze. This time period is a sliding window that always starts at the date of the most recent commit in your repositories. How it works:

  • Unique Counting: Each person is counted only once, regardless of how many projects they contribute to.

  • Author Aliases: If you see a higher than expected number of active authors, you may have developers committing code with multiple names. To address this, you should map their multiple email addresses using author aliases to ensure accurate counting (instructions here).

  • Ex-Developers: Marking someone as an "ex-developer" does not exclude them if they have committed code within the three-month window.

  • License Impact: Only active authors count toward your license; historic contributors (no commits in 3 months) do not.

Visualising your Active Authors

You will see the total active author count in the CodeScene footer and can find a full list of your Active Authors under:

Success Insight: We recommend having one global teams/developer configuration with alias mapping configured and applying this to all of your projects to reduce administrative overhead

Understanding Active Author Calculations for Legacy Projects

In CodeScene, the Active Author count is based on a rolling three-month window that starts from the date of the latest commit in the repository, not from the current date. This detail can sometimes cause confusion when looking at the total number of active authors, especially in legacy or inactive projects.

Here’s an example to illustrate how it works:

  • Jane Doe is marked as a former contributor.

  • The last commit in the entire repository was made on June 15, 2023. You can verify this in the project dashboard under Scope → Analysis Data → Commits (make sure the commits are sorted by date so the latest appears at the top).

  • Jane’s last personal commit was also on June 15, 2023, which is now about 9 months ago. You can find this under Team Dynamics → Author Statistics.

  • Yet, under Active Authors, Jane still appears as active.

This happens because the three-month activity window begins relative to the latest repository commit not relative to today’s date.

In this example, the “active” period spans March 15 to June 15, 2023, based on when the last commit occurred. Even though that window is months in the past, Jane still qualifies as “active” within that context since no newer commits have been made to shift the evaluation forward.

If someone were to make a new commit today, the three-month window would move forward accordingly (e.g., October 2025 to January 2026). At that point, Jane would no longer fall into the active author range and would drop out of the Active Authors list.

So, in summary:

  • Active Authors are determined by the last three months of activity starting from the most recent commit, not the current date.

  • As a result, inactive or legacy projects can appear to have “active authors” until new commits are introduced and the time window updates automatically.