A Visualization for Software Project Awareness and Evolution

Real-time awareness of other developers' activities is a powerful tool to assist in coordination of developer activities. Thus far, this type of awareness has focused only on individual developers, with information regarding individual artifacts provided in a contextualized visualization. Here, we build upon our prior work, but take a broader perspective: visualization and exploration of workspace activity and evolution on a project- wide basis. We believe this visualization helps project managers who now have a comprehensive view of all project activities, allowing them to intelligently steer development and adjust task assignments. Developers can also benefit from this high level view by understanding how their work relates with each other and to the project as a whole. Another interesting aspect of our work is that we can visualize the evolution of workspaces—and the emergent project evolution—either live or postmortem: since our tool stores all the workspaces' events, we can replay, stop, rewind, and visually inspect the effort at any given point in time to find trends, problems, and other patterns of interest.