ChangePrism: Visualizing the Essence of Code Changes

TL;DR

ChangePrism is a visualization tool that enhances understanding of code changes by providing both overview and detailed views, addressing limitations of traditional diff-based review methods.

Contribution

The paper introduces ChangePrism, a novel visualization approach and tool that improves comprehension of code changes by integrating extraction from git history with intuitive visual representations.

Findings

Provides a comprehensive overview of code changes across commits

Enables detailed inspection of specific code modifications

Improves developer understanding of code evolution

Abstract

Understanding the changes made by developers when they submit a pull request and/or perform a commit on a repository is a crucial activity in software maintenance and evolution. The common way to review changes relies on examining code diffs, where textual differences between two file versions are highlighted in red and green to indicate additions and deletions of lines. This can be cumbersome for developers, making it difficult to obtain a comprehensive overview of all changes in a commit. Moreover, certain types of code changes can be particularly significant and may warrant differentiation from standard modifications to enhance code comprehension. We present a novel visualization approach supported by a tool named ChangePrism, which provides a way to better understand code changes. The tool comprises two components: extraction, which retrieves code changes and relevant information from the git history, and visualization, which offers both general and detailed views of code changes in commits. The general view provides an overview of different types of code changes across commits, while the detailed view displays the exact changes in the source code for each commit.