Sample users

Joe the Code Janitor

Joe wants to find obsolete constructs, or pervasive but incorrect idioms, and remove them. He needs a good cross-reference utility (which exist) but he would like it to see back in time (which they can't).

Beatrice the Backporter

Beatrice has been assigned to fix bugs in a two-year-old version of an application. Most of the bugs have been fixed in the current version, but not all, and she must make the smallest changes possible to the old version. She needs to be able to search the change history to find bugfixes, then understand them in context to minimize their impact.

Richard the Release Manager

Richard is in charge of getting the current version of Beatrice's application in shape to be released. If Beatrice, or anyone else, finds a bug in the current version, he needs to know about it and decide whether it should be fixed before the release. He needs to monitor all changes going into the current version and evaluate how risky they are.

Ka-Ping Yee pointed out during the presentation that this list doesn't include "Dan the Developer," who's implementing new features and needs to do lots of merge operations. It's not immediately obvious how to use history visualization to help merges, but I do think it's possible. Thank you, Ping.

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