Home // International Journal On Advances in Software, volume 16, numbers 3 and 4, 2023 // View article
Authors:
Roy Oberhauser
Keywords: Git; virtual reality; visualization; version control systems; software configuration management; city metaphor
Abstract:
The increasing demand for software functionality necessitates an increasing amount of program source code that is retained and managed in version control systems, such as Git. As the number, size, and complexity of Git repositories increases, so does the number of collaborating developers, maintainers, and other stakeholders over a repository’s lifetime. In particular, visual limitations of command line or two-dimensional graphical Git tooling can hamper repository comprehension, analysis, and collaboration across one or multiple repositories when a larger stakeholder spectrum is involved. This is especially true for depicting repository evolution over time. This paper contributes VR-GitCity, a Virtual Reality (VR) solution concept for visualizing and interacting with Git repositories in VR. The evolution of the code base is depicted via a 3D treemap utilizing a city metaphor, while the commit history is visualized as vertical planes. Our prototype realization shows its feasibility, and our evaluation results based on a case study show its depiction, comprehension, analysis, and collaboration capabilities for evolution, branch, commit, and multi-repository analysis scenarios.
Pages: 141 to 150
Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2023. Used with permission.
Publication date: December 30, 2023
Published in: journal
ISSN: 1942-2628