Visualization of Methods Changeability Based on VCS Data
This addresses software engineers' need to identify potentially problematic code areas, though it is incremental as it builds on existing ideas of using change frequency for quality improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of undetected bugs in software by proposing a tool that visualizes method change frequency from version control data within an IDE, aiming to highlight code fragments needing developer attention.
Software engineers have a wide variety of tools and techniques that can help them improve the quality of their code, but still, a lot of bugs remain undetected. In this paper we build on the idea that if a particular fragment of code is changed too often, it could be caused by some technical or architectural issues, therefore, this fragment requires additional attention from developers. Most teams nowadays use version control systems to track changes in their code and organize cooperation between developers. We propose to use data from version control systems to track the number of changes for each method in a project for a selected time period and display this information within the IDE's code editor. The paper describes such a tool called Topias built as a plugin for IntelliJ IDEA. Its source code is available at https://github.com/JetBrains-Research/topias. A demonstration video can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsqc4gCTxfA.