UC Irvine

In today’s world, we work with a collection of artifacts generated across different tasks in almost all domains. These artifacts could be documents, sketches, images or code snippets based on the domain. Clearly, sometimes we have to go back in time to access these artifacts for various reasons. One reason could be to recall when and why certain decisions were made, to see what the impact of a decision was, to clarify a decision made by another person, or to see what other alternatives we might have created at the time. Currently, a combination of solutions like Google Docs, GitHub, Confluence and Slack are employed for this purpose. Most of these tools offer a repository where artifacts are archived based on informal or sub-optimal practices improvised by the group of people working together. A research project at the University of California, Irvine called Linecept, is exploring a different approach, namely storing artifacts in timelines. Almost akin to Gantt charts, Linecept tracks which artifacts are produced, when they are produced, and by what team members. A limitation of the original implementation of Linecept was scalability. In particular, Linecept utilized an open-source timeline visualization component in its implementation that created problems when too many artifacts were present or too long a time was being tracked. In this thesis, I provide the motivation for such a tool, introduce Linecept briefly and provide an overview of other alternative libraries that exist. I also present a list of requirements that are important for a timeline-based visualization tool. Then, I introduce and discuss an architecture that helps to overcome the limitations of the original implementation of Linecept and existing code libraries and tools. Subsequently, I present the implementation of the design and evaluate the prototype built using this architecture.