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Spike – A code editor plugin highlighting fine-grained changes
Escobar, Ronald; Sandoval Alcocer, Juan Pablo; Tarner, Hagen; u. a. (2022): Spike – A code editor plugin highlighting fine-grained changes, in: 2022 Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT), IEEE, S. 167–171, doi: 10.1109/VISSOFT55257.2022.00026.
Faculty/Chair:
Title of the compilation:
2022 Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT)
Conference:
2022 Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT), 03-04 October 2022 ; Limassol, Cyprus
Publisher Information:
Year of publication:
2022
Pages:
ISBN:
978-1-6654-8092-5
Language:
English
Abstract:
Information about source code changes is important for many software development activities. As such, modern IDEs, including, IntelliJ IDEA and Visual Studio Code, show visual clues within the code editor that highlight lines that have been changed since the last synchronization with the code repository. However, the granularity of the change information is limited to a line level, showing mainly a small colored icon on the left side of the lines that have been added, deleted, or modified.This paper introduces Spike, a source code highlighting plugin that uses the font color to visually encode fine-grained version difference information within the code editor. In contrast to previously mentioned tools, Spike can highlight insertions, deletions, updates, and refactorings all in a same line. Our plugin also enriches the source code with small icons that allow retrieving detailed information about a given code change. We perform an exploratory user study with five professional software engineers. Our results show that our approach is able to assist practitioners with complex comprehension tasks about software history within the code editor.
GND Keywords: ; ; ;
Software
Quellcode
Versionsverwaltung
Visualisierung
Keywords: ;
software visualization
source code editor
DDC Classification:
RVK Classification:
Peer Reviewed:
Yes:
International Distribution:
Yes:
Type:
Conferenceobject
Activation date:
April 25, 2023
Versioning
Question on publication
Permalink
https://fis.uni-bamberg.de/handle/uniba/59195