Cooperation wordle using pre-attentive processing techniques

Developer turnover can result in a major problem when developing software. Senior developers leaving the team cause a loss of knowledge; on the other hand, new developers need some time to become fully productive. In this paper, we propose to use a wordle to visualize quickly the level of cooperation of the team in the project. Each word is the name of a class; the size of the word depends on the total effort spent by the team on the corresponding class, and the color is determined by the percentage of team working on the class. We applied pre-attentive processing techniques in the designing phase, so that the user can find out quickly those classes requiring high effort of a small part of the team. This information allows to take corrective actions, such as re-allocating some resources. Thus, this visualization can help in mitigating the knowledge loss and the slowing down due to turnover. On the base of our wordle, we describe four possible cases of development activities. A sample application of our visualization, in the context of a multi-developer project, shows concretely its potentials. We checked, through simulations, that the interpretation of our wordles remains the same for color blind users.