From the webpage:
What is this?
This is a plugin for IntelliJ to analyze project source code history. It has two parts:
- transforming VCS history into .csv format (csv because it’s easy to read and analyze afterwards)
- analyzing history and displaying results using d3.js (requires a browser). This is currently done in a separate Groovy script.
Originally inspired by Delta Flora by Michael Feathers. It has now diverged into something a bit different.
WARNING: this is work-in-progress.
Why?
There seems to be a lot of interesting data captured in version control systems, yet we don’t tend to use it that much. This is an attempt to make looking at project history easier.
Interesting for visualization of project version control but I mention it as relevant to data versioning.
What if in addition to being in narrative prose, “facts,” such as claims about “yellow cake” uranium, were tracked by data versioning?
So that each confirmation or uncertainty is liked to a particular fact. Who confirmed? Who questioned?
There is a lot of data but limiting to to narrative structures means reduced access to track, re-structure and re-purpose that data.
A step in the right direction would be to produce both narrative and more granular forms of the same data.
Are there lessons we can draw from project source control?