Authors:
Ilenia Fronza
and
Stefano Trebeschi
Affiliation:
Free University of Bolzano - Bozen, Italy
Keyword(s):
OvERVIeW, Word Cloud, Visualization, Code Ownership, SVN.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Applications
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Operational Research
;
Project Management
;
Software Engineering
;
Software Metrics and Measurement
Abstract:
In many situations, awareness about code ownership is important; for example, this awareness might allow to contact the responsible person(s) of a piece of code to get clarifications. Source versioning systems can provide information about code ownership. However, the considerable amount of data collected might prolong the time to retrieve the information needed. OvERVIeW addresses this issue: it collects data from a versioning system and visualizes developers’ effort using a well-known and intuitive visualization, the word cloud. We applied pre-attentive processing principles in the designing phase, which use graphical properties (e.g., form and color) that are processed pre-attentively, i.e., they are understood faster. In our visualization, each word represents a class; the number of lines added and removed (during a given time period) is used as size metric, and the color represents the developer(s) working on the code. We show how OvERVIeW can be used to visualize three differen
t cases of code ownership: collective, weak, and strong. We report a sample application of OvERVIeW in the context of a multi-developer OSS project.
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