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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3 Comments

  • 1 Guillaume Theoret

    Posted April 18, 2008 at 12:36 pm
    Permalink

    Wow this looks amazing.. Is the program going to be released?

  • 2 Jeremy

    Posted April 18, 2008 at 12:54 pm
    Permalink

    Hi Guillaume, thanks for checking out the video. I'm hoping that we'll be able to release this software in some form, yes. Right now we're still in early stages, but I'll be posting updates here as we progress so stay tuned!

    Again, thanks for having a look and let me know if you have any questions.

  • 3 Nicholas

    Posted April 20, 2008 at 5:15 pm
    Permalink

    Very cool! Wish we had this on the last project I was working on :-)

3 Trackbacks

  1. [...] and Jeremy, two of my grad students) would be particularly interested in comments on their tool for threading project histories — it’s going to be the focus of their research, and I think it’s a very cool [...]

  2. [...] between them in a Microsoft tech report. Ligature shares some common ground with our work on threading software project histories. I’d love to see an evaluation of a tool like this in front of real developers in an [...]

  3. [...] also comes from emails, chat, and bug tracking systems. I’m already somewhat familiar with interfaces that integrate project data across multiple repositories and I’d like to see how developers make use of a tool that provides integrated awareness [...]

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