The comprehension of software evolution remains one of the most challenging and time-intensive tasks in software development, further complicated by the sheer size and complexity of systems. Researchers have addressed the problem in several ways, using both static and dynamic analysis. Visualization has proven to be a promising technique, and over the years a myriad of approaches in 2D and 3D have been proposed, even extending in more recent times to virtual reality (VR). All leverage the most used human sense, vision. We present an approach that leverages our second most used sense, hearing, by mapping the information related to software evolution onto sounds, thus opening up an underexplored domain, the one of software sonification. Data about software evolution is intrinsically centered around time, which is one of the things that hearing as a sense is good at: processing information sequentially. Our approach, implemented in a tool, enables sonifying the evolution of the files belonging to a software repository over time, utilizing harmonic chord progressions to represent code changes and identifying developers through musical instruments. We illustrate the feasibility of our approach with a case study and report on insights and reflections.

The lifecycle and development of software systems are strongly dependent on time: A critical dimension that must be considered when analyzing software evolution. Many visualization approaches have been proposed to support developers in analyzing software systems. Yet, most of these focus on static representations, which struggle to convey evolution in time, and leverage only vision. In contrast, hearing—although underutilized—is well suited for processing sequential information, making sound a powerful medium to convey changes chronologically.We present a multimodal approach, implemented in a tool named SonicSight, that combines software sonification and visualization to analyze the development pace of software repositories interactively. A pulse synthesizer modulates its speed based on daily commits, while frequencies represent individual developers and their contribution activity. To support interpretation, the sonification is paired with a real-time interactive visual representation of software-related information. We illustrate such sonified visualization approach through case studies and discuss the underlying time model we employed, crucial for representing both sound and the temporal nature of software evolution.

Commits, which log the changes that have been performed by developers, are the central mechanism to drive the evolution of software systems. Understanding the intricacies of commits can be a nontrivial endeavour. Firstly, this is due to the diff-based textual nature of how versioning systems record the changes. Moreover, a commit can involve several files and pertain to various, overlapping tasks that the developer was tackling, which can lead to difficult to understand “tangled commits”. Furthermore, often commit messages lack quality. The only mechanism to really understand the changes performed in a commit is given by text-based “diff” representations, which are cumbersome to use. We present an approach, based on interactive animated visualizations, to facilitate the comprehension of the changes tracked by commits. To validate the approach, we implemented an interactive visual analytics tool which allows developers to dissect a commit in its constituent parts and observe, through the animations supported by our tool, the specifics of each change. We illustrate our approach with examples, and report on our findings and insights.

Understanding the evolution of software systems is a challenging task, due to their sheer size and complexity. Several visualization approaches have been presented over the years, using both 2D and 3D depictions. The vast majority of the approaches is geared towards understanding the “big picture”, facilitating the comprehension of the overall evolution. However, when it comes to understanding the basic building blocks of software evolution, i.e., the commits performed by the developers, visualization seems to fall short in favor of the de facto standard of textual diff views. We present an approach, implemented in a custom tool, to depict commits using interactive animations which allow the viewer to inspect and dissect the intricacies of one or multiple commits. We illustrate our approach on a number of case studies, showing its potential benefits.