Abstract
Code repositories are a common way to archive software source code files. Understanding code repository content and history is important but can be difficult due to the complexity of code repositories. Most available tools are designed for users who are actively maintaining a code repository. In contrast, external developers need to assess the suitability of using a software library, e.g. whether its code repository has a healthy level of maintenance, and how much risk the external developers face if they depend on that code in their own project. In this paper, we identify six risks associated with using a software library, we derive seven requirements for tools to assess these risks, and we contribute two dashboard designs derived from these requirements. The first dashboard is designed to assess a software library's usage suitability via its code repository, and the second dashboard visually compares usage suitability information about multiple software libraries' code repositories. Using four popular libraries' code repositories, we show that these dashboards are effective for understanding and comparing key aspects of software library usage suitability. We further compare our dashboard to a typical code repository user interface and show that our dashboard is more succinct and requires less work.
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