Visualizing GitHub issues
Additional information
Authors
Fiechter A.,
Minelli R.,
Nagy C.,
Lanza M.
Type
Article in conference proceedings
Year
2021
Language
English
Abstract
The rise of distributed version control systems, such as git, and platforms built on top of it, such as GitHub, has triggered a change in how software is developed. Most notably, state-of-the-art practice foresees the use of pull requests and issues, enriched by means to enable discussions among the involved people. Platforms like GitHub and GitLab have thus turned into comprehensive and cohesive modern software development environments, also offering additional mechanisms, such as code review tools and a transversal support for continuous integration and deployment. However, the plethora of concepts, mechanisms, and their interconnections are stored and presented in textual form, which makes the understanding of the underlying evolutionary processes difficult. We introduce the notion of an issue tale, a visual narrative of the events and actors revolving around any GitHub issue, and present an approach, implemented as an interactive visual analytics tool, to depict and analyze the relevant information pertaining to issue tales. We illustrate our approach and its implementation on several open-source software systems.
Keywords
Software evolution visualization, Visual analytics, GitHub issues
Conference proceedings
2021 Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT)
Pages (or article number)
155-159
Diffusion
License
License undefined
Visibility
Public
Status open access
Green
