GitSonifier: using sound to portray developer conflict history

Abstract

There are many tools that help software engineers analyze data about their software, projects, and teams. These tools primarily use visualizations to portray data in a concise and understandable way. However, software engineering tasks are often multi-dimensional and temporal, making some visualizations difficult to understand. An alternative for representing data, which can easily incorporate higher dimensionality and temporal information, is the use of sound. In this paper we propose the use of sonification to help portray collaborative development history. Our approach, GitSonifier, combines sound primitives to represent developers, days, and conflicts over the history of a program's development. In a formative user study on an open source project's data, we find that users can easily extract meaningful information from sound clips and differentiate users, passage of time, and development conflicts, suggesting that sonification has the potential to provide benefit in this context.