A Visualization of Comments from Jira and Confluence

Last week, I happily participated in my first FedEx at Atlassian.

FedEx is a quarterly competition held by the company in an effort to keep it’s staff feeling creative and hopefully produce some exciting new functionality for Atlassian’s products. Pairing is also encouraged for this so I worked with Confluence developer, Anna Katrina Dominguez.

We produced a network visualization that shows where users of Confluence and Jira have left comments. I found something similar (and maybe a bit more, ahem, polished) in this blog post of Jeffrey Heer’s about his project Exploring Enron. He visualized which members of Enron’s staff had been sending each other emails.  My post from a few days ago explains why I chose this for my FedEx project.

I’ve done a write up of our project on Atlassian’s web-site. It also includes a pdf of the visualization. The colors are pretty bad and the UI designer was just in agony that we weren’t able to remove the outline around each shape. Since we went from having 0 lines of code and a vague idea of what we were doing to a simple implementation of a semantic triple store and a visualization that does have some meaning in 24 hours, I’d say we did ok.

Python, and Anna’s skill at writing Python were impressive. Python is so well-suited to this type of project that I’m not looking forward to going back and re-doing some of this in Java. I want to though, because I like the idea of building up some classes that handle semantic data. I’ve noticed that Python is frequently mentioned as one of the best languages for getting data together and now I know why. We didn’t have to waste any lines of code setting up containers and the data we got out of our test instances of Confluence and Jira was easier to process.

The one disappointment, aside from our My Little Pony colors, was REST. We didn’t get very far with using it and ended up grabbing data through xml-rpc instead. I couldn’t figure out if this was because we just haven’t used it that much or we couldn’t get the data we wanted with it. It’s clear that I need to do some more poking at REST. I’ve got some links and Atlassian’s technical docs on REST + O’Reilly Safari at my disposal. Looks like I might do some blogging about this.

If you’d like to see a few more of the FedEx projects from this round, you can look through the deliveries on this page.