Ritgard: T(r)opical Islands of Socio-Technical Artifacts on GitHub

Abstract

A software project is more than just code. Non-code artifacts often document the human processes and decisions behind source code. The rationale behind a library change, an architectural decision, a problem encountered by a user are all examples of information typically present in socio-technical artifacts (STAs), created and persisted in channels separate from the repository itself (yet sometimes very close---e.g., GitHub Issues with GitHub repositories). These STAs are a trove of information about the project's architecture and its evolution, containing details and insights that code alone cannot provide. Unfortunately, this information is not easily extracted and explored as STAs are frequently fragmented over different communication channels, and are written in natural language. We present Ritgard, a tool that mines GitHub repositories for their STAs, namely Issues, Pull Requests, and Discussions, and visualizes them as 3D islands covered with trees. Each tree represents a single artifact and each island is a topic extracted from the artifacts through a combination of text embedding and text summarization. The terrain of the islands rises out of the ocean as the topic becomes active and sinks back in when it becomes stale, thus depicting the evolution of features and concerns throughout the project's lifetime. We describe the tool's usage and implementation, showing the numerous technical challenges behind Ritgard's visualization.