CodeSee Case Study

Distribute Aid significantly cuts onboarding time with CodeSee.

How the humanitarian aid organization sees massive savings using CodeSee to onboard contributors.

Problem

Onboarding new developers to Distribute Aid open-source projects was requiring at least two four-hour pairing sessions to get folks up to speed. The sessions were challenging to schedule across a global team, and frequently left new volunteers feeling overloaded—an outcome that inspired project churn.

Solution

Distribute Aid integrated CodeSee into its onboarding workflow, including linking to CodeSee Maps in project README documentation. Prospective contributors were then able to asynchronously, easily explore the codebase, including project details placed in Labels and Notes—all before committing to a project. Not only did CodeSee help the Distribute Aid team preserve resources at the outset, but also in code review. Using Review Maps, project maintainers were able to quickly understand the proposed changes of incoming contributors.

Results

In Q4 2021, Distribute Aid saw noteworthy improvement in its end-to-end onboarding experience. The team saved an estimated 72 hours in onboarding time, and received more contributions to its projects than ever before—9 pull requests from new contributors. Ultimately, the team was able to refocus effort on delivering additional project features and tackle operational challenges—a set of feats resulting in an estimated $43,200 in aid delivered!

72 hours

saved per quarter in onboarding

9 new

dedicated contributors

$43,200

in aid delivered

“CodeSee allows Distribute Aid to implement relay-style code handoffs. Everyone is up to date, and we can maintain our momentum without burning out our volunteers.”