Interactive Visualization for Exploring Information Fragments in Software Repositories

TL;DR

ExIF is an interactive visualization tool designed to help developers explore and discover information fragments within software repositories, especially aiding those unfamiliar with the development context.

Contribution

The paper introduces ExIF, a novel interactive visualization method that facilitates exploration of repository data considering its multi-dimensional topological and sequential structure.

Findings

Enables discovery of new information fragments within clusters.

Assists in identifying revisions with user-collected fragments.

Improves understanding of repository data for less experienced users.

Abstract

Software developers explore and inspect software repository data to obtain detailed information archived in the development history. However, developers who are not acquainted with the development context suffer from delving into the repositories with a handful of information; they have difficulty discovering and expanding information fragments considering the topological and sequential multi-dimensional structure of repositories. We introduce ExIF, an interactive visualization for exploring information fragments in software repositories. ExIF helps users discover new information fragments within clusters or topological neighbors and identify revisions incorporating user-collected fragments.