Title
GitSonifier: Using Sound to Portray Developer Conflict History
Kevin North, Shane Bolan, Anita Sarma and Myra B. Cohen
Supplementary Data for -- FSE NIER 2015
Abstract
There are many tools that help software engineers analyze data about their software, projects, and teams. They primarily use visualizations to portray data in a concise and understandable way. However, software engineering tasks are often multi-dimensional and temporal, making some visualizations difficult to understand. An alternative for representing data, which can easily incorporate higher dimensionality and temporal information, is the use of sound. In this paper we propose the use of sonification to help portray collaborative development history. Our approach, GitSonifier, combines sound primitives to represent developers, days, and conflicts over the history of a program’s development. In a formative user study on an open source project data, we find that users can easily extract meaningful information from sound clips and differentiate users, passage of time, and development conflicts, suggesting that sonification has the potential to provide benefit in this context.
Supplementary Data
Sound Name Sound Clip Explanation
Developer Earcons
Download: MP3 WAV 		These sounds represent different developers. Whenever a developer makes a commit, his or her sound is played in the sonification.

Download: MP3 WAV

Download: MP3 WAV

Download: MP3 WAV
Examples of Sonifying Developers
Download: MP3 WAV 		These examples demonstrate how sonifications are created by playing developers' earcons in the order the developers committed. For instance, in the first example, three different developers made commits. In the second example, one developer made two commits, then a second developer made two more commits.

Download: MP3 WAV
Day Separator Earcon
Download: MP3 WAV 		This earcon is played when a calendar day ends.
Day Separator Example
Download: MP3 WAV 		For example, in this sonification, a developer makes two commits, then makes a third commit on the following day. The day separator indicates when the developer stopped working on the first day.
Conflict Drums: One Conflict
Download: MP3 WAV 		Drums indicate the presence of conflicts. The louder the drums are, the more conflicts are present in the project.
Conflict Drums: Two Conflicts
Download: MP3 WAV
Conflict Drums: Three Conflicts
Download: MP3 WAV
Conflict Drum Examples
Download: MP3 WAV 		These are examples of how the conflict drums work. In the first example, when the drums start, a conflict was introduced. When the drums stop, the commit made immediately after the drums stop resolved the conflict.

The second example is similar. In addition, when the drums get louder, it means that a second conflict was introduced before the first one was resolved. When the drums become quieter again, it indicates that one of the two conflicts was resolved.

Download: MP3 WAV
Sonification of Real-World Data
Download: MP3 WAV 		This sonification represents real-world data obtained from sonifying part of the version control history of Voldemort, an open-source project. The sonified data includes commits that developers contributed to Voldemort on November 4 and 5, 2009.
Task Sonification Used in Our User Study
Download: MP3 WAV 		In our user study, we created several variations of the real-world example in order to portray different version-control histories. This sonification is one of the variations we created.

There are two primary differences between this sonification and the real-world data sonification. First, one developer was represented by a choir in the real-world data, but a different developer is represented by an oboe in this one. Second, there was one conflict in the real-world data, but there are two in this sonification. Study participants were asked to identify these changes as well as recognize that both sonifications have the same number of days.
Experiment Materials

We ran the training and sonification questions portions of our experiment in a website hosted on a laboratory computer. You can see them here: Training and Sonification Questions

You can see the questionnaire we asked participants to complete here: Questionnaire

Acknowledgments

This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation awards CCF-1253786 and CCF-1161767. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

We would like to acknowledge Bakhtiar Kasi for sharing Voldemort git data history and analysis algorithms with us.