Supporting empirical studies by non-intrusive collection and visualization of fine-grained revision history

This paper presents a code-revision history collection and visualization Eclipse plugin for use in empirical studies of programmers. The revision history is collected non-intrusively, and does not depend on CVS-checkin. The visualizations allow for detailed viewing of the code changes for an individual file, and also for an overview of the alterations to a project. In this paper we describe the plugin, and also give examples of our own uses for the plugin for empirical work.