2013 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing Visualization of Fine-Grained Code Change History YoungSeok Yoon Brad A. Myers, Sebon Koo Institute for Software Research Human-Computer Interaction Institute School of Computer Science School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA
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[email protected] Abstract—Conventional version control systems save code inherent in VCSs [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. The basic idea is to keep all changes at each check-in. Recently, some development environ- the small low-level changes such as individual insertion, dele- ments retain more fine-grain changes. However, providing tools tion, and replacement of text. Recently, this approach has been for developers to use those histories is not a trivial task, due to shown to be feasible [4, 5, 8], and there have been attempts to the difficulties in visualizing the history. We present two visuali- make use of these fine-grained histories in two different ways. zations of fine-grained code change history, which actively inter- act with the code editor: a timeline visualization, and a code his- The first way is to help developers understand the code tory diff view. Our timeline and filtering options allow developers evolution by recording and replaying fine-grained changes in to navigate through the history and easily focus on the infor- the integrated development environments (IDEs) [6, 9, 10]. mation they need. The code history diff view shows the history of One experiment showed that developers can answer software any particular code fragment, allowing developers to move evolution questions more quickly and correctly when provided through the history simply by dragging the marker back and with a replay tool.