RepoVis: Visual Overviews and Full-Text Search in Software Repositories

Project managers and software developers often have difficulty maintaining an overview of the structure, evolution, and status of collaborative software projects. Some tools are available for typical source code management systems, which provide summary statistics or simple visual representations of merge-branch graphs. However, comprehensive visual overview and search facilities for such repositories are lacking. RepoVis is a new tool which provides comprehensive visual overviews and full-text search for projects maintained in Git repositories. The overview shows folders, files, and lines of code colour-coded according to last modification, developer, file type, or associated issues. Full-text searches can be performed for terms of interest within source code files, commit messages, or any associated metadata or usability findings, with matches displayed visually in the overview. The utility of the RepoVis approach is illustrated with three use cases of real-world software inspection. Insights are presented into the utility of full-text search and visual presentation of matches for program comprehension.