Enhancing Commit Graphs with Visual Runtime Clues

Abstract

Monitoring software performance evolution is a daunting and challenging task. This paper proposes a lightweight visualization technique that contrasts source code variation with the memory consumption and execution time of a particular benchmark. The visualization fully integrates with the commit graph as common in many software repository managers. We illustrate the usefulness of our approach with two application examples. We expect our technique to be beneficial for practitioners who wish to easily review the impact of source code commits on software performance.