Bug-Fix Variants: Visualizing Unique Source Code Changes across GitHub Forks
Daigo Imamura, Takashi Ishio, Raula Gaikovina Kula, Kenichi Matsumoto

TL;DR
This paper introduces a visualization tool to analyze and identify unique bug fix changes across forks of GitHub repositories, aiding understanding of project evolution and maintenance status.
Contribution
It presents a novel visualization method focusing on unique fork commits, especially bug fixes, to better analyze decentralized project development.
Findings
Successfully identified active forks of discontinued projects.
Effectively detected bug fixes within forks.
Visualization highlights unique code changes across forks.
Abstract
Forking is a common practice for developers when building upon on already existing projects. These forks create variants, which have a common code base but then evolve the code in different directions, which is specific to that forked project requirements. An interesting side-effect of having multiple forks is the ability to select between different evolution directions of the code which is based on developers fixing bugs in the code base. However, the key issue that this decentralized form of information is difficult to analyze. In this study, we propose a visualization to analyze active changes in fork repositories that have not been merged back to the original project. Our visualization shows code commit activities in multiple forks with highlight on bug fix commits in the history of forks. While the commit activity of each repository is visualized similarly to the code frequency…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSoftware Engineering Research · Software System Performance and Reliability · Scientific Computing and Data Management
