Fractal Figures

This software is a Processing sketch used to visualize code ownership as fractal figures. The sketch is used to explore the ownership analyses from Your Code as a CrimeScene. The sketch isn't intended to scale to large systems -- it's a free proof of concept.

License

Copyright © 2014-2023 Adam Tornhill

Distributed under the GNU General Public License v3.0.

Credits

The algorithm and idea comes from research by D'Ambros and Lanza as published in their paper Fractal Figures: Visualizing Development Effort for CVS Entities.

Usage

Run the sketch in Processing. The code has been tested with Processing 4.

When you start the program, it prompts you for a file containing the CSV with the results of an entity-effort analysis. You obtain those ownership metrics via Code Maat.

That's it - the fractal figures will appear together with a color legend to interpret them.

Additional commands

During a visualization, press s to save an image to disk. In case you haven't provided a file with color mappings, the visualization will generate random colors. Just press space to re-draw the image using a new set of colors.

Warnings

Note that the implementation is quick and dirty (with emphasis on the later). That means, input data isn't validated. In practice it shouldn't be much of a problem - you'll notice fast.

The program has been implemented properly in CodeScene's free Community Edition, which is intended for professional use. Anyway, I still hope that you'll find this simpler sketch useful in its current shape.