When working on large codebases with many contributors, it’s easy to lose sight of the amount of effort and change that is going into the overall project, especially when those contributors are spread across many teams and locations. Gource is a source code visualization tool which helps capture that “big picture” view of a project, providing a sense of the overall history and contributors to a project.
From the Gource homepage: “Software projects are displayed by Gource as an animated tree with the root directory of the project at its centre. Directories appear as branches with files as leaves. Developers can be seen working on the tree at the times they contributed to the project.”