Visualizing Repositories
by Mike Gunderloy - Jun. 17, 2008Comments (1)- Related Blog Posts
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Slashdot passes on the news of Code_Swarm, a new project from Michael Ogawa, who has been working in the field of software visualization for a while now. The videos that it generates are pretty (here's the one for Apache 2), and they do serve to give you an idea of the pulse of activity in a particular project. You can pick out whether code or documentation commits prevail, as well as see major contributors rise and fall.
Of course, this is not the only tool to try to give us a visual representation of the activity in a software repository. A few years ago Oliver Steele did some work with a Subversion-to-iCal conversion, and in the Rails world some folks have experimented with viewing commits as an OLAP cube. Eric Gilbert's CodeSaw combines commits with project email for another activity visualization.
There are some tools already shipping to help with a visual representation of repository activity, though they tend to lag behind academic research. For example, Atlassian's commercial FishEye system works with CVS, Subversion,or Perforce repositories. In the git world, of course, there's the gitk browser.
Are these tools anything more than a pretty toys? I think they show a lot of potential, but so far that potential hasn't been realized in any of the SCM systems that I work with. Particularly when coming on board with an existing large project, though, a graphical view can be more useful than trying to wade through a mountain of commit messages. If you're looking for an undersupported corner to contribute to, or trying to figure out who the major maintainer is of a section of code, a graphical view coupled with your brain's ability to spot patterns can be very useful.
