An Experiment in Organic Software Visualization

“I’ve been studying software projects for a while now. Not the
programming, but the people–the way they interact with each other
through collaboration and communication. My investigations have
always been visual: I’ve built applications that create pictures of
what is happening within software projects. But they have always
had a rigid structure to them. Organic information visualization,
coined by Ben Fry, is a different approach to information
visualization. It eschews traditional data confinement in space and
lets the elements play together in freeform and unpredictable
ways.

“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…”

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