research-article

In-Situ Visualisation of Fractional Code Ownership over Time

Authors:

Christoph Müller,

Thomas ErtlAuthors Info & Claims

VINCI '15: Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Visual Information Communication and Interaction

Pages 13 - 20

https://doi.org/10.1145/2801040.2801055

Published: 24 August 2015 Publication History

Abstract

The term code ownership is used in software engineering to describe who authored a certain piece of software. Code ownership is commonly determined by investigating the data from version control systems, defining the owner as the person who contributed the most lines to a file, module, etc. Existing visualisation for ownership usually relies on per-line annotations from the version control system, thus only conveying the information who changed a line the last time, potentially adding some visual cue about how old the respective change is. This, however, can be misleading, because any change of even a single character changes ownership. In this paper, we propose a visualisation that accounts for fractional ownership changes over time on a per-character basis. Our technique incorporates visual cues to convey that typical definitions of ownership have an inherent uncertainty and provides details on the cause of this uncertainty on demand. For our definition of code ownership being a low-level one, we propose implementing the visualisation as an in-situ visualisation in the code editor of modern development environments. We will show examples of the efficacy of our approach and discuss its advantages and disadvantages compared to conventional line-based ownership.

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Cited By

Koana ULe QRahman SCarlson CChew FNayebi M(2024)Examining ownership models in software teamsEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10538-529:6Online publication date: 27-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-024-10538-5
Orfanó TBigonha MFerreira KCavalcante EDantas FBatista TPinto G(2020)The Evolving Nature of Developers' Contributions in Open Source ProjectsProceedings of the 14th Brazilian Symposium on Software Components, Architectures, and Reuse10.1145/3425269.3425284(131-140)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3425269.3425284
Ribeiro Dda Silva FValença DFreitas EFrança CGenero MJedlitschka AJørgensen MScanniello GSampath SCaivano DPort D(2016)Advantages and Disadvantages of using Shared code from the Developers PerspectiveProceedings of the 10th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement10.1145/2961111.2962624(1-6)Online publication date: 8-Sep-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2961111.2962624

In-Situ Visualisation of Fractional Code Ownership over Time
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools

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cover image ACM Other conferences

VINCI '15: Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Visual Information Communication and Interaction

August 2015

185 pages

ISBN:9781450334822

DOI:10.1145/2801040

General Chair:
Takayuki Itoh,
Program Chairs:
Paolo Bottoni,
Shigeo Takahashi

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 24 August 2015

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VINCI '15

VINCI '15: The 8th International Symposium on Visual Information Communication and Interaction

August 24 - 26, 2015

AA, Tokyo, Japan

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VINCI '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 12 of 32 submissions, 38%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 71 of 193 submissions, 37%

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Cited By

Koana ULe QRahman SCarlson CChew FNayebi M(2024)Examining ownership models in software teamsEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10538-529:6Online publication date: 27-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-024-10538-5
Orfanó TBigonha MFerreira KCavalcante EDantas FBatista TPinto G(2020)The Evolving Nature of Developers' Contributions in Open Source ProjectsProceedings of the 14th Brazilian Symposium on Software Components, Architectures, and Reuse10.1145/3425269.3425284(131-140)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3425269.3425284
Ribeiro Dda Silva FValença DFreitas EFrança CGenero MJedlitschka AJørgensen MScanniello GSampath SCaivano DPort D(2016)Advantages and Disadvantages of using Shared code from the Developers PerspectiveProceedings of the 10th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement10.1145/2961111.2962624(1-6)Online publication date: 8-Sep-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2961111.2962624

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