Unlike static documents, version-controlled documents are edited by one or more authors over a certain period of time. Examples include large scale computer code, papers authored by a team of scientists, and online discussion boards. Such collaborative revision process makes traditional document modeling and visualization techniques inappropriate. In this paper we propose a new visualization technique for version-controlled documents that reveals interesting authoring patterns in papers, computer code and Wikipedia articles. The revealed authoring patterns are useful for the readers, participants in the authoring process, and supervisors.
Good overviews of techniques for visualizing the software evolution process are @cite_2 @cite_18 . Specific examples include SeeSoft @cite_21 , a line-by-line visualization of source code, as well as Augur @cite_8 and Advizor @cite_13 . The latter two are collections of visualizations, such as 2D and 2.5D matrix views which identify file and source changes in terms of project branch, date, author, etc. Cenqua Fisheye http: fisheye.cenqua.com is one such commercial tool for visually interacting with software repositories, however the interface consists of text-centric and graphical displays displaying line charts and histograms. The StarGate project @cite_6 and CodeSaw http: social.cs.uiuc.edu projects codesaw.html serve roles similar to FishEye, i.e. tracking where and to what extent authors are concentrating their efforts, but provide a less static presentation.
@cite_18 @cite_8 @cite_21 @cite_6 @cite_2 @cite_13
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This paper presents a technique for visualizing the interactions between developers in software project evolution. The goal is to produce a visualization that shows more detail than animated software histories, like code_swarm [15], but keeps the same focus on aesthetics and presentation. Our software evolution storylines technique draws inspiration from XKCD's "Movie Narrative Charts" and the aesthetic design of metro maps. We provide the algorithm, design choices, and examine the results of using the storylines technique. Our conclusion is that the it is able to show more details when compared to animated software project history videos. However, it does not scale to the largest projects, such as Eclipse and Mozilla. The Seesoft software visualization system allows one to analyze up to 50000 lines of code simultaneously by mapping each line of code into a thin row. The color of each row indicates a statistic of interest, e.g., red rows are those most recently changed, and blue are those least recently changed. Seesoft displays data derived from a variety of sources, such as version control systems that track the age, programmer, and purpose of the code (e.g., control ISDN lamps, fix bug in call forwarding); static analyses, (e.g., locations where functions are called); and dynamic analyses (e.g., profiling). By means of direct manipulation and high interaction graphics, the user can manipulate this reduced representation of the code in order to find interesting patterns. Further insight is obtained by using additional windows to display the actual code. Potential applications for Seesoft include discovery, project management, code tuning, and analysis of development methodologies. > During software evolution a developer must investigate source code to locate then understand the entities that must be modified to complete a change task. To help developers in this task, proposed text summarization based approaches to the automatic generation of class and method summaries, and via a study of four developers, they evaluated source code summaries generated using their techniques. In this paper we propose a new topic modeling based approach to source code summarization, and via a study of 14 developers, we evaluate source code summaries generated using the proposed technique. Our study partially replicates the original study by in that it uses the objects, the instruments, and a subset of the summaries from the original study, but it also expands the original study in that it includes more subjects and new summaries. The results of our study both support the findings of the original and provide new insights into the processes and criteria that developers use to evaluate source code summaries. Based on our results, we suggest future directions for research on source code summarization. Existing information-visualization techniques that target small screens are usually limited to exploring a few hundred items. In this article we present a scatterplot tool for personal digital assistants that allows the handling of many thousands of items. The application's scalability is achieved by incorporating two alternative interaction techniques: a geometric-semantic zoom that provides smooth transition between overview and detail, and a fisheye distortion that displays the focus and context regions of the scatterplot in a single view. A user study with 24 participants was conducted to compare the usability and efficiency of both techniques when searching a book database containing 7500 items. The study was run on a pen-driven Wacom board simulating a PDA interface. While the results showed no significant difference in task-completion times, a clear majority of 20 users preferred the fisheye view over the zoom interaction. In addition, other dependent variables such as user satisfaction and subjective rating of orientation and navigation support revealed a preference for the fisheye distortion. These findings partly contradict related research and indicate that, when using a small screen, users place higher value on the ability to preserve navigational context than they do on the ease of use of a simplistic, metaphor-based interaction style