Depviz

👓 Issue dependency visualizer, a.k.a. "auto-roadmap".

Introduction

dependency visualizer (auto roadmap)

depviz aggregates tasks from multiple projects and generates visual representations (graphs) of the dependencies.

inspired by this discussion: jbenet/random-ideas#37

Philosophy

The ultimate goal of this tool is to allow the tech and the non-tech to collaborate seamlessly.

Oftentimes, there are “non-technical project managers” that love tools like Jira and try to define everything, including the delay required. Developers, however, mostly hate Jira-like tools and prefer to focus on small tasks with an easy-to-use interface, like Trello, GitHub issues, GitLab issues.

The idea of depviz is to:

• link those different tools (aggregate the different sources and find the relationships: find that this exact “Jira user story” belongs to those 5 technical issues on github
• create various visual ways of displaying this information. Then, we can have a company that has some non-technical project manager only focusing on user stories and their priorities, and devs that focus on tasks and estimate the tasks by themselves (everyone doing what they are good at)
• in general, help everyone have the overall vision more clear

Target

• Graphs are “fun” but not very useful yet, a good dependency tool would be like graphviz. The current depviz version makes the graph in something that is more “weight-based”, because nodes will be grouped to make the graph fit the screen. Graphviz is not focused on making things beautiful, but focused on being 100% clear on the dependency. We need a good graph driver that supports this kind of graph.
• Having options for multiple layouts/graphs.
• Implementing the PERT method and adding more fields in depviz: due date, difficulty, etc, in order to create graphs for “finding the shortest path”, for example.
• Improving the UI to improve collaboration (sharing a URL, etc).

Demo

https://depviz-demo.moul.io/

Limited to the following repos: moul/depviz, moul/depviz-test, moul-bot/depviz-test.

Supported providers

Depviz aggregates the entities of multiple providers into 3 generic ones.

---

Supported providers:

• GitHub
  • Task: Issue, Pull Request, Milestone
  • Owner: TODO
  • Topic: TODO
• GitLab: (planned)
• Jira (planned)
• Trello (planned)

TODO: detailed mapping table

Under the hood

Depviz entities

There are 3 entities:

• A Task that have a real life cycle: opened->closed
• An Owner which only contains things
• A Topic which allows categorizing/tagging other things

Examples:

• a Milestone is a Depviz Task, because even if it contains other tasks, it also has a well defined lifecycle: to be closed when every children tasks are finished.
• a Repository is a Depviz Owner because even if you can archive a repository, it's not the normal lifecycle, and will most of the time be unrelated with the amount of tasks done

A Task can be considered as something directly actionable, or indirectly/automatically closable based on a business rule.

More info here: ./api/dvmodel.proto

Task

should have:

• a unique ID: canonical URL
• a LocalID: human-readable identifier
• a Title: not necessarily unique
• a Kind: Issue, Pull Request, Milestone, Epic, Story, Card
• a State: opened, in progress, or closed
• an Owner: see below
• a Driver: GitHub, GitLab, Jira, Trello

may have:

• other relationships: Author, Milestone, Assignees, Reviewers, Label, Dependencies, Dependents, Related, Parts, Parents
• other metadata: Description
• other states: Locked
• timestamps: Created, Updated, Due, Completed
• metrics: NumDownvotes, NumUpvotes, NumComments

Owner

should have:

• a unique ID: canonical URL
• a LocalID: human-readable identifier
• a Title: not necessarily unique
• a Kind: User, Organization, Team, Repo, Provider
• a Driver: GitHub, GitLab, Jira, Trello

may have:

• an Owner
• other states: Fork
• other metadata: Homepage, Description, Avatar, Fullname, Shortname
• timestamps: Created, Updated

Topic

should have:

• a unique ID: canonical URL
• a LocalID: human-readable identifier
• a Title: not necessarily unique
• a Kind: Label
• a Driver: GitHub, GitLab, Jira, Trello

may have:

• an Owner: see above
• other metadata: Color, Description

Install

Download a release

https://github.com/moul/depviz/releases

Install With Golang

go get moul.io/depviz/cmd/depviz/v3

Using brew

brew install moul/moul/depviz

Usage

TODO

License

© 2018-2021 Manfred Touron

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE) or the MIT license (LICENSE-MIT), at your option. See the COPYRIGHT file for more details.

SPDX-License-Identifier: (Apache-2.0 OR MIT)