✨ (New Backend) Software History Narratives #424
Description
The primary goal is to design, implement, and evaluate a narrative visualization artifact within the Binocular ecosystem. Specifically:
(G1) Design a data model and correlation algorithm that links VCS, ITS, and CI events into narrative segments, following the hexagonal architecture of binocular-backend-new
(G2) Implement an interactive timeline-based narrative view in binocular-frontend-new that surfaces the evolutionary story of a mined repository
(G3) Evaluate the artifact's utility for project comprehension by conducting a controlled user study with student developers, comparing narrative-based exploration against Binocular's existing dashboard views. The study measures task correctness, completion time, and perceived usefulness (Technology Acceptance Model). Following DSR [7], the evaluation validates the artifact in context, answering whether narrative visualizations meaningfully improve newcomers' understanding of software project history compared to conventional metric dashboards.
Engineering Tasks in Binocular:
URL: https://thesis.inso-world.com/topics/7aa5b6bf-e04c-4917-a430-99d9b1d2bda2
Backend
- T1: Analyze existing Binocular data model; identify VCS, ITS, CI event schemas and their linkable attributes (hashes, issue IDs, pipeline IDs).
- T2: Design and implement a Narrative Correlation Service (hexagonal port/adapter) that temporally and referentially links cross-source events into narrative segments.
- T3: Expose a REST/GraphQL endpoint returning ordered narrative segments with metadata (time range, event counts, key actors, summary).
- T4: Generate textual micro-summaries per segment (template-based, e.g., "Release v2.1: 47 commits, 8 issues closed, CI green").
Frontend
- T5: Design the Narrative Timeline UI component (React) — an interactive, horizontally scrollable timeline rendering narrative segments with drill-down capability.
- T6: Implement segment detail view showing correlated VCS/ITS/CI events per narrative epoch, with filtering by actor, event type, and module
Generell
- T7: Integration test the full pipeline on ≥2 real OSS repositories mined by Binocular.
- T8 (optional): Conduct and analyze the user study (design, ethics, recruitment, execution, statistical analysis).