Chronicler: Interactive Exploration of Source Code History
End-User Programming
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Wittenhagen, Moritz
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Cherek, Christian
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Borchers, Jan
Proceedings of the ACM CHI'16 Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems
2016-05-07
v.1
p.3522-3532
© Copyright 2016 ACM
Summary: Exploring source code history is an important task for software maintenance.
Traditionally, source code history is navigated on the granularity of
individual files. This is not fine-grained enough to support users in exploring
the evolution of individual code elements. We suggest to consider the history
of individual elements within the tree structure inherent to source code. A
history graph created from these trees then enables new ways to explore events
of interest defined by structural changes in the source code. We present Tree
Flow, a visualization of these structural changes designed to enable users to
choose the appropriate level of detail for the task at hand. In a user study,
we show that both Chronicler and the history aware timeline, two prototype
systems combining history graph navigation with a traditional source code view,
outperform the more traditional history navigation on a file basis and users
strongly prefer Chronicler for the exploration of source code.