Visualize your project with Gource

Developing software is a pretty abstract job. In many cases you don’t really “see” what’s happening. Once a developer has completed a task, she/he sends some bits to the SCM and starts the next one. In open source projects several developers do this every day, sometimes at the same time, but they might not even be aware of it. Wouldn’t it be nice sometimes to be able to visualize what’s happening there? The good thing is that an SCM tracks very precisely who worked on which parts of a framework. The tool Gource mines this history and calculates a relatively nice visualization. It is fun to watch this especially if you know the committers. As an example, I played around with it on the beginnings of the Eclipse 4 Application Platform.

Of course, I also tried Gource with projects I am involved in. The following video shows the history of the EMF Client Platform (1.0 branch). While Eike was configuring our build, I was working on the EMFStore integration. Like a video player, Gource also allows you to skip to a certain point in time. In the video, I jump to the time when Eugen joined the project. Later you see Florian starting the development of a UI model.