ACM TechNews

Visualizing Open Source Software Development

UC Davis News and Information (07/30/08) Fell, Andy

Code_swarm, a new open source program developed by Michael Ogawa, a computer science graduate student at the University of California, Davis, creates short, colorful movies of the development process of open source software. Modeled after music videos, Code_swarm uses dancing points of light, rings of color, and a soundtrack as it displays the contributions of programmers to open source applications. The names of developers float across the screen to show the stage of their involvement in a project, then float away if they stop contributing. Colored dots move toward the names to show which developer worked on new files, and form rings around the names. They hover together when developers worked on the same or related files, and they are farther apart when they worked on different parts of the application. "The viewer gets an impression of the dynamics of the project: Who the big players are, whether they work on the same or separate files, and the scale of the project in time and space," Ogawa says.

http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8723

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