All entries for Tuesday 30 June 2009

How do programmers feel about their software?

Writing about web page http://www.natpryce.com/articles/000748.html

Nat Pryce posted an article entitled "What do Programmers Feel About Their Software?", which provided a program to try and visualise what the comments in code indicate about programmers' emotions. The program basically analyses all of the comments in the program (which are usually only seen by other programmers working on the same software) and uses Synesketch to display a visual representation of emotion.

So, naturally, I plugged in some of our own software, and the results were quite surprising... There are some demos on the Synesketch website which show some examples of what the images mean.

Blogbuilder

Surprisingly, there is a lot of happiness here (signified by circles in bright colours).

Files.Warwick

Again, strong happiness for our file-sharing application.

Our (unreleased and unnamed) portal project

Even stronger happiness here, which is to be expected more since it's a relatively new project and I'm the only one who's worked on it...

Sitebuilder2

In sharp (and dire) contrast, comments in our CMS show severe sadness. There are probably a few reasons for this... use of Swing WebFlow is probably up there as one of the top reasons. There's also a LOT more code (and more programmers) than in any of the other projects, and we're a lot more likely to look at each others' code and go "wrong!"

Mathew Mannion : 30 Jun 2009 12:22 |  Tags: Java Programming Work |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem