Tanja Munz

Science meets Art

Visualizing Work Processes in Software Engineering with Developer Rivers

Work processes involving dozens or hundreds of collaborators are complex and difficult to manage. Problems within the process may have severe organizational and financial consequences. Visualization helps monitor and analyze those processes. In this paper, we study the development of large software systems as an example of a complex work process. We introduce Developer Rivers, a timeline-based visualization technique that shows how developers work on software modules. The flow of developers' activity is visualized by a river metaphor: activities are transferred between modules represented as rivers. Interactively switching between hierarchically organized modules and workload metrics allows for exploring multiple facets of the work process. We study typical development patterns by applying our visualization to Python and the Linux kernel.

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Michael Burch, Tanja Munz, Fabian Beck, and Daniel Weiskopf.
Visualizing work processes in software engineering with developer rivers.
In 2015 IEEE 3rd Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT), pages 116–124, 2015.
@inproceedings{burch2015developer, 
  author={Burch, Michael and Munz, Tanja and Beck, Fabian and Weiskopf, Daniel}, 
  booktitle={2015 IEEE 3rd Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT)},  
  title={Visualizing work processes in software engineering with developer rivers},  
  year={2015}, 
  pages={116-124}, 
  doi={10.1109/VISSOFT.2015.7332421}
}

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