Supporting Software Development Task Understanding by Visualizing Operation History

Edit operation history of source code can be used to understand how the software has been developed. However, since such an edit history is enormous, it is effective to first grasp the outline of development and then look at the details, although existing tools do not well support the process. In this paper, we propose Edited Method Highlight (EMH), which extends an existing operation replay tool called OperationReplayer to support understanding of development tasks by visualizing the recorded operation history. The visualization shows the transition of edited parts (classes and methods) and specific types of operations (debugging and committing) on the timeline displayed in the replay tool. We conducted a preliminary experiment to examine whether users could share a common understanding of task outlines. The result shows they reported task kinds with similar word sets while reported time stamps of task boundaries and word sets for developed functions in each task were various. This paper also discusses several success and failure factors to reach common understanding of development tasks.