Lab UK code_swarm

Matt kindly put our current project SVN logs in to code_swarm. We should add it to our project documentation.

project visualization with codeswarm from Matt Haynes on Vimeo.

Pretty amazing visualisation. It could do with a bit of curation to help explain key points/people (’who was Mike?’, ‘when was r0.1′, ‘why the big explosion of activity on Oct 20th?’ etc.), a bit like the Python example on the code_swarm site.

Perhaps it could read & display some conventions from the log messages or release notes, but curation is quite a personal thing and only really doable to those with a intimate knowledge of the project, so here it goes…

Looking through our logs, mid-to-end of October marked the end of the technical prototype, where Al left and the project started in earnest with designers, flash developers, project managers all starting to make commits, which explains the flurry of activity.

Matt H, the main developer is a sort of persistant floating presence, he’s joined by Darren in mid-November who replaced Al. Mike & Tom arrive for a few weeks then gradually fade away as they were contracted in to complete specialist parts of the build.

Pierre, the senior designer, fades out as the build goes on, indicating (in our department, at least) design is very much an up-front activity with lesser input the longer the project exists. As we start v2 of the project around April I’d expect the design activity to increase a lot more.

There’s a nice long period of inactivity for xmas.

The very tall lines in the histogram along the foot of the video are external dependencies (flex, phpdoc etc.) rather than huge commits by a single developer, otherwise they might indicate a developer has been saving up code on their working copy and committing it all at once, which of course would be naughty of them.

Peter B stays too long in the visualisation for my liking, he only committed once, and that was a mistake (we share our repository with the rest of the BBC), so we should probably filter him out of our logs.

I expect the project to settle down in to fortnightly bursts of activity to match our release pattern as we work toward a live release.