Visualising SCC repositories

[thoult]

I came across this last week and introduced it to my colleagues yesterday. I was looking for a method of visualising the complexity of some of the projects that I work with, as well as show how they grow over time, and came across Gource.

Apparently it works with SVN, Bazaar, Hg and Git, but I've only tested it with the latter, which we use in tandem with TFS.

Here's an example for the Linux kernel.

Here's an example from one of our long-term projects, as generated by a colleague:

[Jacobson-ni]

That's pretty cool. Are you using this information for making any decisions or were you just interested?

[Hooovahh]

I could see this as part of a yearly evaluation of what the team has done.  Managers like pretty pictures (I do too but that's besides the point).  My boss can show his boss a picture of what the team has been doing and their progress, and having a single picture represent code changes might be useful.  I haven't ran this on our repo yet but I kinda what to and then hang it up in my cube if it is pretty enough.

[thoult]

There are a couple of things we plan to use it for:

- Making cool pictures

- Demonstrating the size and complexity of projects

- Showing the timescales in projects

- Indicating the merits of having multiple developers on a project rather than lone wolves all the time

I mean, let's face it, the last three are far less important than the first, but you really can see the effect of having multiple people working on multiple branches through it.

[warren_scott]

This is what I get for spending some time reading about it but not actually trying:

This looks like it is only looking at folder structure and update rate in the repository, but does nothing for actually interpreting the code and understanding the interrelatedness of any of the files/libraries/etc.  Is there anything that mixes this view with "VI Hierarchy" for those of us who have (inherited) code that does not follow best practices for code layout or organization?

[Jacobson-ni]

Jon McBee had two very interesting presentations during the 2016 CLA Summit where he talked about code complexity and package design. He also showed off the Class Dependency Viewer that he made which I think is a cool visualization tool for classes.

http://www.labviewcraftsmen.com/blog/labview-class-dependency-viewer