Comparing Repositories Visually with RepoGrams

Abstract

The availability of open source software projects has created an enormous opportunity for software engineering research. However, this availability requires that researchers judiciously select an appropriate set of evaluation targets and properly document this rationale. After all, the choice of targets may have a significant effect on evaluation.We developed a tool called RepoGrams to support researchers in qualitatively comparing and contrasting software projects over time using a set of software metrics. RepoGrams uses an extensible, metrics-based, visualization model that can be adapted to a variety of analyses. Through a user study of 14 software engineering researchers we found that RepoGrams can assist researchers in filtering candidate software projects and make more reasoned choices of targets for their evaluations. The tool is open source and is available online: http://repograms.net/