Repository views for rapid exploration and developer insight

The process of developing and maintaining software systems involves many artifacts. Developers create and change these artifacts to adapt and maintain the system. This work is often done with little knowledge of the artifacts´ prior history and context. Online tools that are used to manage these artifacts leave clues to this history in the form of event records in a repository. Over the past 10 years, there has been considerable work in the field of repository mining to recover history from repository records. More recently, work has focused on simplifying the process for average workers to mine this information for themselves. This paper presents work on large scale projects in a leading telecommunication industry to reconstruct both history and context from repository records, and present the information in novel views for easy exploration and useful insight. Using these views, developers are able to gain valuable insight both into each artifact´s role in the system, and about the experience of earlier developers attempting similar changes to the system. The results provide objective snapshots of the development process that help developers and managers make informed decisions about changes to the system. This project is a continuation of our previous work on non-invasive process metrics and analysis.