Seeking the Source

Authors

• Cleidson de Souza
• Jon Froehlich
• Paul Dourish

Short Description

In distributed software development, the structure of the software system itself can create dependencies between software elements, while the structure of the development process can create dependencies between software developers. The paper uncovers the structures of software projects and the ways in which development processes are inscribed into software artifacts. With open source communities as an example, a range of organizational processes and arrangements are uncovered in software repositories.

Software development, then, is a particularly fruitful domain in which to study the relationship between technological artifacts and the social structures that shape them.

[De Souza et al., 2005]

Figures

The following images show specific visualisations by the "Augur" software.

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Suitable for which data types

This visualization method is most suitable for source code. Properties of the software system and the source code itself are mapped to color and other features of a graphical display. Dependencies between methods (e.g. method A calls method B) and other parts of the source code are visualized. Also relationships between programmers can be graphically displayed. With this method it is easy to understand how different programmers are involved in the code production process and how their methods towards or away from the system's core. Even code ownerships can be tracked.

Evaluation

In our informal evaluations, developers involved in distributed software development projects relied upon both the activity information and the structure information in coordination to develop a holistic view of software development activity.

[De Souza et al., 2005]

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