Creation of an open-source package for the production of a git history report

Context summary

The pharmaceutical company is going into production of Shiny applications and data analysis scripts with R, after having used SAS for many years. Developments within pharmaceutical companies are highly regulated. They require transparent and rigorous reporting of changes made to the code throughout the development process. This involves creating a report that lists all code changes using git commit information, namely :

• the date of the commit
• the name of the developer
• the part of the code impacted
• the content of the commit message which is supposed to be complete and meticulously filled in, indicating:
  • the reason for the modification
  • the list of associated tickets (i.e. issues)

Our intervention

• Define the elements to be included in the report
• Creation of a R package that automatically creates the report based on the git history of a project.

Result & added value

• An open-source R package: {gitdown}
• Creation of a {RMarkdown} book made via {bookdown} which lists all the commits logged in git and contains :
  • a chapter dedicated to the tickets (i.e. issues), with a section for each of the tickets
  • chapters dedicated to the different phases of the development process (i.e. development, production start-up, recipe, etc.).
• {bookdown} to generate the book
• A blog article on generating reports from GitHub and GitLab history