Visually Supporting Source Code Changes Integration: The Torch Dashboard

Automatic and advanced merging algorithms help programmers to merge their modifications in main development repositories. However, there is little support to help release masters (integrators) to take decisions about the integration of published merged changes into the system release. Most of the time, the release master has to read all the changed code, check the diffs to build an idea of a change, and read unchanged code to understand the context of some changes. Such a task can be overwhelming. In this paper we present a dashboard to support integrators getting an overview of proposed changes in the context of object-oriented programming. Our approach named Torch characterizes changes based on structural information, authors and symbolic information. It mixes text-based diff information with visual representation and metrics characterizing the changes. We describe our experiment applying it to Pharo, a large open-source system, and report on the evaluation of our approach by release masters of several open-source projects.