Task and social visualization in software development: Evaluation of a prototype

As open source development has evolved, differentiation of roles and increased sophistication of collaborative processes has occurred. Recently, we described coordination issues in software development and an interactive visualization tool called the Social Health Overview (SHO) developed to address them [12]. This paper presents an empirical evaluation of SHO intended to identify its strengths and weaknesses. Eleven informants in various open source roles were interviewed about their work practices. Eight of these participated in an evaluation comparing three change management tasks in SHO and Bugzilla. Results are discussed with respect to task strategy with each tool and participants' roles. Copyright 2007 ACM.