[vtkusers] VTK code swarm movie

[Marcus D. Hanwell]

On Tuesday 20 October 2009 11:05:49 David Doria wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 10:33 AM, Marcus D. Hanwell
> 
> <marcus.hanwell at kitware.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Prompted by some recent interest in code swarm to visualize the history
> > of VTK I created a few movies from the Git tracking repository (now
> > available on GitHub). Thanks to Andrew Wilson for supplying config files
> > with extra colors for different components of VTK.
> >
> > http://www.vimeo.com/7048785
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Marcus
> 
> Marcus,
> 
> It looks neat, but I'm not that clear about what it is showing. Maybe
> it is obvious to git users, but I've never seen a visualization like
> this before. I found the legend for the colors, but maybe you could
> put a little paragraph with the video explaining the dots: what each
> dot indicates, what their size indicates, and what it means for them
> to be flying around?

Fair point, I added the following paragraph,

The names are those of developers that made commits to the repository, their 
name fades out as the time since their last commit increases. Files swarm 
around the developers as they commit changes to them, gravitating towards the 
developers that last committed changes to those files (dots). The histogram 
along the bottom shows the number of files in each category that were changed 
on a given day.

I hope that makes the visualization clearer, Code swarm is nothing directly to 
do with git, it just allowed me to extract real names rather than CVS 
usernames. If you would like more details you can also check out the 
developers web site. I think this is an interesting way of visually 
summarizing the history of a version controlled code base.

http://vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/~ogawa/codeswarm/

Let me know if the explanation is not clear.

Thanks,

Marcus
-- 
Marcus D. Hanwell, Ph.D.
R&D Engineer, Kitware Inc.
(518) 881-4937