Growing bloom: design of a visualization of project evolution

Abstract

In this paper we describe the design behind the Bloom Diagram, a tool to visualize the evolution of individual participants' code and comment contributions to open source software projects. The design blends techniques such as concentric pie charts, animation, motion trails, and social proxies to produce a compact presentation of the large scale dynamics around software development. We also briefly present some preliminary findings using data gathered from SourceForge, a popular open source project hosting site, and discuss future directions for this work.