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.
Screenshots and Videos
These videos show the evolution of the Scarab open-source
bug tracking system at different stages of development.
Click on the screenshot to download the video.
The videos are encoded with the open-source Xvid codec, which you
can download from
xvid.org if they don't
play out of the box on your computer.
Developer mode starting at the project's
conception. This shows handful of active developers.
The artifact view at the project start.
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.
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.
