Friday, April 1, 2011

Eric Melski hooks Gource to Perforce

Here's a nice article by Eric Melski of Electric Cloud talking about using Gource to visualize the activity of their Perforce server during the development of ElectricAccelerator..

Gource is an intriguing tool. As Melski says, it's not immediately obvious that the Gource displays are useful, but they are certainly beautiful. I'd love to learn more about how people are using Gource, and what sort of information they find that it reveals. Or is it just art?

At work, we think that the concept of The Flow of Change is very powerful and very useful; Laura Wingerd, VP of Product Technology at Perforce, has spoken and written about the concept for years. I particularly enjoy looking at this presentation, with its rich variety of different ways to understand what your code is doing and how it is changing.

Modern systems software projects are complex and intricate, have rich histories, and evolve in sophisticated ways. Tools which help you understand and grasp what is occurring are extremely valuable, so I'll be interested to follow the growth of Gource as more people learn about it and learn how to use it.

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