Githru：通过Git元数据分析了解软件开发历史的可视化分析
Githru: Visual Analytics for Understanding Software Development History Through Git Metadata Analysis
摘要：
Git元数据包含丰富的信息，可供开发人员了解大型软件开发项目的整体上下文。因此，它可以帮助新的开发人员、管理人员和测试人员了解开发的历史，而不需要挖掘大量不熟悉的源代码。然而，目前的Git可视化工具不足以分析和探索元数据：它们主要关注于提高Git命令的可用性，而不是帮助用户了解开发历史。此外，它们不能扩展大型复杂的Git提交图，这在理解整体开发历史方面可以发挥重要作用。在本文中，我们提出了Githru，一个交互式的可视化分析系统，使开发人员能够有效地了解开发历史的背景下，通过Git元数据的交互式探索。我们设计了一个交互式的可视化编码习惯，以可扩展的方式表示一个大的Git图，同时保留Git图中的拓扑结构。为了实现对大型Git提交图的可扩展探索，我们提出了新的技术（图重构，聚类和上下文保持挤压合并（CSM）方法）来抽象大型Git提交图。基于这些Git提交图抽象技术，Githru提供了一个交互式摘要视图，帮助用户获得开发历史的概述，以及一个比较视图，用户可以在其中比较不同的提交集群。Githru的有效性已经通过案例研究得到了证明，这些案例研究由领域专家使用来自一家大型国际IT公司的大型软件开发团队的真实内部数据集进行。一项由12名开发人员参与的受控用户研究将Githru与以前的工具进行了比较，这也证实了Githru在任务完成时间方面的有效性。
英文摘要：
Git metadata contains rich information for developers to understand the overall context of a large software development project. Thus it can help new developers, managers, and testers understand the history of development without needing to dig into a large pile of unfamiliar source code. However, the current tools for Git visualization are not adequate to analyze and explore the metadata: They focus mainly on improving the usability of Git commands instead of on helping users understand the development history. Furthermore, they do not scale for large and complex Git commit graphs, which can play an important role in understanding the overall development history. In this paper, we present Githru, an interactive visual analytics system that enables developers to effectively understand the context of development history through the interactive exploration of Git metadata. We design an interactive visual encoding idiom to represent a large Git graph in a scalable manner while preserving the topological structures in the Git graph. To enable scalable exploration of a large Git commit graph, we propose novel techniques (graph reconstruction, clustering, and Context-Preserving Squash Merge (CSM) methods) to abstract a large-scale Git commit graph. Based on these Git commit graph abstraction techniques, Githru provides an interactive summary view to help users gain an overview of the development history and a comparison view in which users can compare different clusters of commits. The efficacy of Githru has been demonstrated by case studies with domain experts using real-world, in-house datasets from a large software development team at a major international IT company. A controlled user study with 12 developers comparing Githru to previous tools also confirms the effectiveness of Githru in terms of task completion time.
机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来，可能存在错误，请以论文正文为准。
