A Visualization Tool for Analyzing the Suitability of Software Libraries via Their Code Repositories
Casey Haber, Robert P. Gove · Electronic Imaging · 2020
Code repositories are a common way to archive software source code files. Understanding code repository content and his- tory is important but can be difficult due to the complexity of code repositories. Most available tools are designed for users who are actively maintaining a code repository. In contrast, external de- velopers need to assess the suitability of using a software library, e.g. whether its code repository has a healthy level of mainte- nance, and how much risk the external developers face if they depend on that code in their own project. In this paper, we iden- tify six risks associated with using a software library, we derive seven requirements for tools to assess these risks, and we con- tribute two dashboard designs derived from these requirements. The first dashboard is designed to asses a software librarys usage suitability via its code repository, and the second dashboard visu- ally compares usage suitability information about multiple soft- ware libraries’ code repositories. Using four popular libraries code repositories, we show that these dashboards are effective for understanding and comparing key aspects of software library us- age suitability. We further compare our dashboard to a typical code repository user interface and show that our dashboard is more succinct and requires less work.