Visulog

Tool for analysis and visualization of git logs

Presentation

Visulog a tool made for analyzing contributions from the members of a team working as a same given project hosted on a git repository. Its goal is to assist teachers for individual grading of students working as a team. It requires a UNIX system like macOS.

This tool can:

• compute a couple of relevant indicators such as:
  • number of lines or characters added/deleted/changed
  • number of commits
  • number of merge commits
  • number of authors
• visualize the indicators as charts (histograms, pie charts, etc.) embedded in a generated web page.
• to have an exhaustive list of the function, see the following section

Analyzes

This tool will show you :

• The total of commits & merge commits

  • which can be used to see the importance of the work

• The number of modified lines since the beginning of the project

  • Used for similar reason

• Average number of modified lines per day (include in the advanced analysis)

  • It allows you to have an idea of the speed of the project's growth

• The number of commits per day & per month

  • Used to compare when there are more commits

• The number of commits per hour

  • To inspect at which hour is there more commits, independently of the day : indirectly, it informs when collaborators are more efficiency.

• The number of authors

  • More authors implies a more important project

• The number of commits per author

  • It informs of the authors' names, and the importance of their contributions in the project

• The number of modified lines per day (include in the advanced analysis)

  • Useful to have a better view about the daily contribution of the team

• The number of modified lines per author (include in the advanced analysis)

  • To see the contribution of each author in the code

• The number of modified lines per author per day(include in the advanced analysis)

  • To see the daily contribution of each author in the code

Already existing similar tools

• gitstats

Technical means

• The charts are generated by a third party library (R).
• The data to analyze can be obtained using calls to the git CLI. For instance "git log", "git diff --numstat", and so on.

Architecture

Visulog contains the following modules:

• data types for storing raw data directly extracted from git history, with relevant parsers
• a generator of numerical series (for the indicators mentioned above)
• a generator of web pages
• a command line program that calls the other modules using the provided command line parameters
• a shared module for configuration object definitions

Usage

Building the project

1. Clone the repository

   git clone https://gaufre.informatique.univ-paris-diderot.fr/benmouff/visulog.git
   

2. Only if you are on a SCRIPT computer (in one of the TP rooms):

   source SCRIPT/envsetup
   

   This will setup the GRADLE_OPTS environment variable so that gradle uses the SCRIPT proxy for downloading its dependencies. It will also use a custom trust store (the one installed in the system is apparently broken... ).

3. (Optional) Run gradle wrapper (it will download all dependencies including gradle itself, except R)

   ./gradlew build
   

4. Install R

   See https://www.r-project.org to install R

5. (Optional) Register your other account(s) In the file ./AuthorName.txt in this format : MainAccountName=YourSecondAccountName=YourThirdAccountName=..". (Only your main account name will be displayed by the graphs).

Running the software

Open a terminal window and set your working directory to here : /visulog Then, run through your terminal

./run

(It may ask you to allow permission of execution on this file, in which case just do chmod u+x ./run.sh).

Then follow the command usage :

[Visulog] Welcome User !
[Visulog] Usage: ./run [-a | -s] <link/path>
                 ./run [-t]
                 ./run [-h]
Options :
   -s   for a simple analysis (it includes stats on Commits Per
         Month/Day/Hour/Author and the Total of (merged) commits)
   -a   for an advanced analysis (it could take more time! 
        It includes all plugins, see README.md for an exhaustive list)
   -h   to display this

   -t   to run an interactive script (useful if you have differents analysis to do)

Examples :
   ./run -a  https://github.com/Homebrew/install 
        to run an advanced analysis on homebrew-install repository
   ./run -s . 
        to run a simple analysis on this repository

Remarks :
   Writting both -s and -a will automatically let Visulog choose the last one
   See README.md if any errors occurs

Authors :
   LN Supremacy Team

Errors

To properly run this tool, you should have :

• make sure there is no space in the pathname of the visulog directory.
• set a default browser
• allow this application to write files

If you didn't already cloned the concerned git repository :

• have an internet connexion
• as wrote above, running this tool on a public github/gitlab project