The Workspace Activity Viewer gives managers an overview of both past and ongoing activities in a project, using information extracted directly from developers' workspaces. It visualizes the developers and artifacts in a project using a 3D metaphor with stacks of cylinders representing artifacts and developers. Parallel work, developer activity, dormancy, and magnitude of change are represented by size and position along the different axes. The Workspace Activity Viewer reveals how the project is evolving, both socially and technically, via a movie-like playback of the state of the project, showing what developers are active when, and what types of artifacts they contribute to. It also shows social dependencies by revealing when developers are simultaneously working on the same artifact.
These videos show the evolution of the Scarab open-source bug tracking system at different stages of development. Click on the screenshot to watch the video.
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Developer mode starting at the project's conception. This shows handful of active developers. |
The artifact view at the project start. |
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A couple years later, the project is in more of a maintenance stage, with only a couple developers actively making changes at this point. |
The artifact view for the same period as the previous video. |
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This shows the state of the project in 2002, with the parallelism filter on to only show artifacts where 3+ developers are working, and the age filter hiding anything older than one month. So all that is being shown is artifacts that have been worked on by three or more people in a month's period. The large amount of activity in January and February are due to versions 1.0b1, 1.0b2, 1.0b3 and 1.0b4 all being made between Jan 28 and Feb 19. March through June there is one release a month, all with less enthusiasm in the announcement email than the initial ones. July does not have a release and it is one of the least parallel work months. In mid-October, the last release until May 2003 is made. After this release, parallel development spikes until we get to the holidays when things start to taper off again. | |
R. Ripley, A. Sarma, and A. van der Hoek, A Visualization for Software Project Awareness and Evolution, Fourth IEEE International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis, June 2007, pages 137–144.
R. Ripley, A. Sarma, and A. van der Hoek, Using Visualizations to Analyze Workspace Activity and Discern Software Project Evolution, Technical Report UCI-ISR-06-01, Institute for Software Research, University of California, Irvine, 2006.
June 2007, Workspace Activity Viewer: Visualizing Project-wide Awareness & Evolution, ISR Research Forum, Irvine, CA.
Effort partially funded by the National Science Foundation under grant numbers CCR-0093489, IIS-0205724, and IIS-0534775. Effort also supported by an IBM Eclipse Innovation grant and an IBM Technology Fellowship.