Use the Forks, Look! Visualizations for Exploring Fork Ecosystems

Forking is a common practice in open-source and industrial software development, leading to the emergence of complex fork ecosystems. Understanding the evolution and relationships within such ecosystems is crucial for developers and project managers to ensure that useful changes are merged back into the original project or synchronized between forks. However, understanding complex fork ecosystems with up to tens of thousands of forks in different states (e.g., abandoned, co-evolving) is challenging, with visualizations being a means to address this challenge. In this paper, we investigate six visualizations designed to provide key insights into the dynamics of fork ecosystems. We started our work by analyzing GitHub community feedback on the official Network Graph visualization for fork ecosystems and categorized the fork-related tasks mentioned by developers in 237 comments. Then, we designed our visualization prototype VisFork, which contains six different visualizations that serve the three most frequently mentioned tasks. These visualizations allow users to explore temporal patterns, commit classifications, and collaboration dynamics across a fork ecosystem. Through a user study involving 10 GitHub community participants and seven students, we evaluated the usefulness of the visualizations. The results demonstrate the potential of VisFork to provide valuable insights into fork ecosystems, with positive feedback on the visualizations, but also suggestions for further improvements. Our work contributes to the development of user-centered tools that help to understand the intricacies of fork-based development and promote collaborative software-development practices.