UE dashboard: awareness of unusual events in commit histories

Abstract

To be able to respond to source code modifications with large impact or commits that necessitate further examination, developers and managers in a software development team need to be aware of anything unusual happening in their software projects. To address this need, we introduce UEDashboard, a tool which automatically detects unusual events in a commit history based on metrics and smells, and surfaces them in an event feed. Our preliminary evaluation with a team of professional software developers showed that our conceptualization of unusual correlates with developers' perceptions of task difficulty, and that UEDashboard could be useful in supporting development meetings and for precommit warnings.