threading software project histories

Another grad student and I recently put together a video for a project related to our research. The summary we’ve been working with follows:

Your average software project is made up of a rich history of change events: project emails, bug reports, source code edits, and wiki page edits are common types of change events that occur frequently in software projects. Although each of these change events are independent, many events may be logically related. For example, an email in a project’s mailing list archives may refer to a related bug report. Similarly, the content of a project’s wiki page may be related to a snippet of source code from the version control repository. We present a system to automatically cluster related events into logical groupings. In addition, we present a visualization tool to help project stakeholders explore change events and the relationships between them in a software project history.

This is really the first cut I’ve had at building tools for visualizing software project histories. There are some things I want to change about this prototype, but I like the way that things are shaping up and I’ve had some good feedback from others. So, if you’re curious, check out the video and let me know if you have any questions or comments!

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Published:
4.18.08 / 9am
Category:
Research, Software
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