Understanding git history: A multi-sense view

KJ North, A Sarma, MB Cohen - … of the 8th International Workshop on …, 2016 - dl.acm.org
KJ North, A Sarma, MB Cohen
Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Social Software Engineering, 2016dl.acm.org
Version control systems archive data about the development history of a project, which can
be used to analyze and understand different facets of a software project. The project history
can be used to evaluate the development process of a team, as an aid in bug fixing, or to
help new members get on track with development. However, state of the art techniques for
analyzing version control data provide only partial views into this information, and lack an
easy way to present all the dimensions of the data. In this paper we present GitVS, a hybrid …
Version control systems archive data about the development history of a project, which can be used to analyze and understand different facets of a software project. The project history can be used to evaluate the development process of a team, as an aid in bug fixing, or to help new members get on track with development. However, state of the art techniques for analyzing version control data provide only partial views into this information, and lack an easy way to present all the dimensions of the data. In this paper we present GitVS, a hybrid view that incorporates visualization and sonification to represent the multiple dimensions of version control data - development time line, conflicts, etc. In a formative user study comparing the GitHub Network Graph, GitVS, and a version of GitVS without sound, we show GitVS improves over the GitHub Network Graph and that while sound makes it easier to correctly understand version history for some tasks, it is more difficult for others.
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