OvERVIeW: Ownership Visualization Word Cloud

In many situations, awareness about code ownership is important; for example, this awareness might allow to contact the responsible person(s) of a piece of code to get clarifications. Source versioning systems can provide information about code ownership. However, the considerable amount of data collected might prolong the time to retrieve the information needed. OvERVIeW addresses this issue: it collects data from a versioning system and visualizes developers’ effort using a well-known and intuitive visualization, the word cloud. We applied pre-attentive processing principles in the designing phase, which use graphical properties (e.g., form and color) that are processed pre-attentively, i.e., they are understood faster. In our visualization, each word represents a class; the number of lines added and removed (during a given time period) is used as size metric, and the color represents the developer(s) working on the code. We show how OvERVIeW can be used to visualize three different cases of code ownership: collective, weak, and strong. We report a sample application of OvERVIeW in the context of a multi-developer OSS project.