If you remember at the end of my previous post, I raised a set of questions. Two were related to the use of colors in the graphs I showed:

• Are the four levels of colors for the activity visualization enough?
• Should we have some color coding on the nodes and use different layouts?

Since I had limited time lately to push on the other questions I thought I would do something about the colors at least. :-)

So let's revisit our "whole year 2017 for all of KDEPIM" (that is the parts in KDE Applications, in Extragear and in Playground) with more colors!

Firstly, this gives us the weekly activity using the "Magma" palette and a linear interpolation of the colors between the minimum and maximum commit counts:

Like before we see Laurent Montel and Christian Mollekopf as most consistent committers throughout the year 2017. That being said the new palette also allows us to see more things. First, it's not only that Laurent Montel is engaged every week it is also that he has more commits than anyone else almost each week! We can also now more clearly see unusual spikes of activities from Volker Krause and from Daniel Vrátil both on week 37.

I think that next I'll try to investigate why Laurent's commit count is so high and what happened on week 37 last year. But that will be for a next installment, stay tuned!

Secondly, this also gives us a new contributor network graph. I adjusted it in several ways: removed all visual clues on where the (0;0) point is, it's highly irrelevant but people seem to cling to it and try to interpret it; I also switched back to "Kamada & Kawai" for the force-directed layout since it's the one which helps the most to perceive the graph topology; finally I color coded the nodes depending on their centrality. For that last part I used the "Magma" palette again linearized on the full scale of centrality values of the graph. And since there are more than one definition of centrality I used the Degree Centrality. This is the simplest one and is a defined for a given node as "the fraction of nodes it is connected to". Since we's still in the mind set of finding out the contributors who collaborate with the most people through the files they commit too it's very suitable.

This time we don't even need to zoom in to spot the code KDEPIM contributors in 2017. With the color coding, we see right away again that Laurent Montel, Daniel Vratil and Volker Krause are the core contributors. It's much less guess work than the last time, we're backed by the color coded centrality metric now. We can also better see that Allen Winter, Sandro Knauß and David Faure are very central too, something that we missed the last time.

Now what about Christian Mollekopf who is our other consistent committer? In the activity graph, with a better view of the topology like we have thanks to "Kamada & Kawai" we manage to find him on one of the outter rings (he's the pale orange node on the top left of the graph). He's indeed not very central considering the "degree centrality" but we can see that he seems to act as a bridge between the core contributors and contributors with a very low centrality.

This is an interesting new finding probably worth chasing further.

As you can see I'm not done exploring this data set! More questions are showing up before I can move to another area of KDE I think.