Telling Software Evolution Stories with Sonification

The comprehension of software evolution remains one of the most challenging and time-intensive tasks in software development, further complicated by the sheer size and complexity of systems. Researchers have addressed the problem in several ways, using both static and dynamic analysis. Visualization has proven to be a promising technique, and over the years a myriad of approaches in 2D and 3D have been proposed, even extending in more recent times to virtual reality (VR). All leverage the most used human sense, vision. We present an approach that leverages our second most used sense, hearing, by mapping the information related to software evolution onto sounds, thus opening up an underexplored domain, the one of software sonification. Data about software evolution is intrinsically centered around time, which is one of the things that hearing as a sense is good at: processing information sequentially. Our approach, implemented in a tool, enables sonifying the evolution of the files belonging to a software repository over time, utilizing harmonic chord progressions to represent code changes and identifying developers through musical instruments. We illustrate the feasibility of our approach with a case study and report on insights and reflections.