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CodeProcess

CodeProcess is a software visualization tool that is designed to give the viewer an immediate assessment of the general characteristics of the process used to develop a piece of software. It features inter-active controls for the user to analyze details of the process. It is a web application developed using Python, D3 and React JS.

How CodeProcess Works?

We encourage you to read our paper on CodeProcess to better understand what CodeProcess is and how it can fit in your scenarios.

The CodeProcess software has two components: API server and front-end. The API is built on Python using Flask, Sqlite, Pandas, difflib and othe modules. (You can see the complete list of moduels used in requirements.txt). The front-end application is built using React and D3. React manages the over-all application and handles network requests, and D3 is responsible for the interactive visualization on CodeProcess. You can go to front-end repository to better understand the application and the code. The basic working mechanism of our application is following:

  1. The Keystroke logs or events are obtained from a PyCharm application using pyPhanon Plugin that we built. (You can download the plugin from marketplace).
  2. The log file is uploaded to the application at /upload. upload recent-upload
  3. After the file has been uploaded to the application it is sent to the API Server. The API Server saves the file to a specific folder and starts another process that parses the keystroke logs, identifies the files in a log, create necessary diff files, final code and other files needed by the front-end for the visualization, playback and highlighting purpose. For each file API Server creates following files:

    code: Contains the final code. (Used in a final code window).
    diff_book: Contains the snapshot of the current code for each event or snapshot. (Used in Playback window)
    grid_points: Contains the points required to plot the visualization. (Used in visualization window.)
    diff_match_blocks: Contains the matching parameters between the snapshot and final code. (Used for diff highlighting between snapshot and final)
    diff_line_number: Contains the line number of a cursor for each code snapShot. (Used to move cursor as real user for each snapshot)
  4. The front-end app fetches the recent uploads in the upload pages and shows their status and any messages.
  5. After the upload has been processed, the front-end fetches the latest uploads and the files extracted in a drop-down menu.
  6. You can select any file from the drop-down to see the visualization and playback.

CodeProcess

The uploaded and processed files are stored in a sqlite database: "database.db". You can clear the folders and delete the database files to reset the app.

Installation

First, download this repository and install required python packages.

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Open main.py and change the following folder location:


    app.config['UPLOAD_FOLDER'] = './uploads'
    app.config['OUTPUT_FOLDER'] = './files'

UPLOAD_FOLDER => Folder to store uploaded files.
OUTPUT_FOLDER => Folder to store generated files in Step 3.

Run the application using:
python main.py