This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights up and flies towards that developer. Files are colored according to their purpose, such as whether they are source code or a document. If files or developers have not been active for a while, they will fade away. A histogram at the bottom keeps a reminder of what has come before.

With the success of open source software projects, such as Apache and Mozilla, comes the opportunity to study the development process. In this paper, we present StarGate: a novel system for visualizing software projects. Whereas previous software project visualizations concentrated mainly on the source code changes, we literally place the developers in the center of our design. Developers are grouped visually into clusters corresponding to the areas of the file repository they work on the most. Connections are drawn between people who communicate via email. The changes to the repository are also displayed. With StarGate, it is easy to look beyond the source code and see trends in developer activity. The system can be used by anyone interested in the project, but it especially benefits project managers, project novices and software engineering researchers. The StarGate construct can be used to visualize not only software projects, but also music catalogues, online forums, and generally any complex system that features a network connected to a hierarchy.

Open source software projects such as Apache and Mozilla present an opportunity for information visualization. Since these projects typically require collaboration between developers located far apart, the amount of electronic communication between them is large. Our goal is to apply information visualization techniques to assist software engineering scientists and project managers with analyzing the data. We present a visualization technique that provides an intuitive, time-series, interactive summary view of the the social groups that form, evolve and vanish during the entire lifetime of the project ...

We have created a simple treemap visualization of the Saarland University Eclipse bug data.

Pretty-printers reduce the time programmers spend reading and understanding code. Pretty-printers found in modern development environments are hand crafted for responsiveness, an imperative property for interactive environments. However, these pretty-printers are language specific, tightly integrated into development environments, and have limited customizability. The literature describes how to generate pretty-printers that are customizable and reusable, and that are make efficient use of the presentation space. However, these pretty-printers only provide a global rendering capacity, i.e., they can only render entire files. This reduces responsiveness, preventing their use in modern development environments. We present a flexible, stable, peephole-efficient pretty-printing algorithm for generated pretty-printers. It is flexible in that it is capable of screen-optimized layouts, and also supports fisheye views. The algorithm is peephole-efficient, in that it performs work proportional to the size of the visible window and not the size of the entire file. Finally, the algorithm is stable, in that the rendered view is identical to that which would be produced by formatting the entire file.