Commit visualisation is inaccurate/unintuitive

[abtagle]

Currently, the commits are visualised as shown below for the example repository.

As seen in the screenshot, many commits occurred over a long period of time (September 5th - September 22nd), but only five nodes are visualised, and all appear to be "owned" by Victor. The hover over shows a number of commits a node represents (to the correct total number of commits overall), suggesting that Jacky only had 4 commits to the project out of 55, which is not the case. It is unclear to a user what these nodes represent. We feel that more thought needs to be given to this in terms of either

1. Better documentation of what the representation is trying to convey
2. A complete rework of the visualisation

We feel approach 1 is a small to medium issue, as it is just adding to documentation or maybe adding to the GUI, but requires an understanding of the backing implementation. We feel approach 2 may be favourable for the application as a whole, but will be a large issue.

We did not have any other existing repositories that could be used with VisualGit (i.e. having a single branch, having other contributors so this view is useful).

To recreate a similar view

1. Choose a repo that VisualGit can display containing two or more contributors
2. View the graph visualisation, zooming in to a point where it is not a node-per-commit graph
3. Observe the node grouping and visualisation (person associated with it), and how it does not fit any intuitive grouping of the commits.
4. Observe that the hover over information does not give an explanation of this chosen representation.

Related issues, including adding GitHub profile pictures to nodes (#27) and adding emailing to users functionality (#24) exist.

[abtagle]

@kblincoe Sorry we tried to find sotfen-701 as per the brief but couldn't and found both softeng-701 and softeng701, and weren't sure what to do with that.

[kblincoe]

Oops there is a typo in the handout. It is @softeng-701

[abtagle]

@softeng-701

[abtagle]

@softeng-701

[softeng-701]

@abtagle Which option do you plan to implement? Both sound reasonable.

[abtagle]

Not sure if I'll personally be able to implement either of them due to the issue I have claimed, but I feel the best way to go about this (given how the simplification of the commit graph works) is with approach 1. To achieve this, someone must

1. Change the documentation under "Features" to describe how the graph is auto-sized and simplified with zoom
2. Update the hover information to include more helpful information e.g. some notion of time the node represents, breakdown of commits by user

This approach would be a small to medium issue - not sure which.

@softeng-701

[abtagle]

@softeng-701

[softeng-701]

Approved @abtagle