In-Situ Visualisation of Fractional Code Ownership over Time

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.