Our paper, Commit Bubbles, has been accepted to ICSE 2015: New Ideas and Emerging Results.

The abstract of the paper follows:

Developers who use version control are expected to produce systematic commit histories that show well-defined steps with logical forward progress. Existing version control tools assume that developers also write code systematically. Unfortunately, the process by which developers write source code is often evolutionary, or as-needed, rather than systematic. Our contribution is a fragment-oriented concept called Commit Bubbles that will allow developers to construct systematic commit histories that adhere to version control best practices with less cognitive effort, and in a way that integrates with their as-needed coding workflows.

In other words, Commit Bubbles aims to alleviate the “tangled commit” and “non-descriptive commit message” dilemmas that developers routinely encounter when constructing version control commit histories: