Exploiting software history in the IDE

IDEs do typically not exploit historical information about software systems to eg. improve navigation of source artifacts. Historical information such as author information (eg. which methods have been introduced or changed by which developer) or version information (eg. when a method has been committed or changed, how often it has been updated, etc.) can of great value to identify source artifacts of interest though. If we could for instance see that a class has been changed in almost every commit, this class might be of great interest for us. Or we could use historical information to provide hints to developers what they should also update, eg. those classes, methods that have been updated in most commits.

This project aims at exploiting historical information about software evolution in the IDE (either Squeak/Pharo Smalltalk or Eclipse). A means to use historical information in IDEs is for instance to apply a color map or heat map to all source artifacts, eg. a red ('hot') colored class is one changing in almost all commits wheras a blue ('cold') class almost never changes. This color scheme can be reused to express various smenatics, eg. to represent the age of source artifacts, or how much an artifact is 'owned' by a specific developer (eg. by me), or to give hints how many developers contributed to this specific artifact.

The project could address the following research questions:

• How can we apply a color map denoting historical information to source artifacts in an IDE?
• What kind of historical information is useful to more efficinetly navigate source space?
• What other means exploiting historical information are useful to be applied in the context of IDEs?

Contact: roethlis@iam.unibe.ch