Xero kaleidoscope

It’s hard to show the development work that goes on behind the scenes to make Xero, but sometimes we can show you a small glimpse. Using a tool called Gource it’s possible to visualize the changes that are made to files over a period of time based on source control activity (for the non-techs this is essentially the ‘library’ in which we keep the files that make up Xero, and developers ‘borrow’ them, work on them, and ‘return’ them when they’re done). Gource has given us our very own kind of time-lapse kaleidoscope of all this activity since 2007.

Every file in the application is represented as a colored dot, the directory structure as lines and every developer and designer contributing as a little person. Because of the large number of files they’re grouped in to a single dot to save space. There are so many files in Xero it would be impossible to show them in a web-sized video. One second of video time represents one development day, and the video is just under 20 minutes long. (Warning, can be quite mesmerizing!)

What the video doesn’t show is the amount of planning, design, coordination and testing that is required with Xero, or any of the background tasks that run the Xero application, but it should give an idea of the scale of development that’s going on.