Coding™: Development Task Visualization for SW Code Comprehension

In a software development project, a developer tends to use the ‘diff’ view of the version control system (VCS) to understand development tasks such as fixing bugs, adding new features, and refactoring. However, the view only shows the difference of resources between the recent and previous versions in a commit, without providing any information about associated updates for completing a specific task. This causes a developer to spend a lot of time understanding development tasks, especially in the project where source code should be shared throughout team members. In order to handle this issue, we propose a novel tool Coding Time-Machine, in short Coding™, that automatically identifies and visualizes development tasks and their associated task elements (e.g., class and method). Coding™ extracts development tasks composed of task elements and causal relationships between them in a commit and facilitates one to compare the recent version of a code to the previous for each task. In addition, it allows one to navigate tasks of all commits in the code repository so that a developer feels like carrying out the time-travel of the coding activities in the software development project. For the evaluation, we measured the performance of tasks extracted from Coding™ for eight open-source Java projects, and obtained 0.87 of precision and 0.88 of recall. Also, we surveyed the usefulness of our tool for 20 participants, 80% of participants thought that showing tasks and their associated elements in a commit helps one to comprehend source code, and all participants responded that showing tasks in a chronicle way facilitates one to understand coding activities.