Can Git Repository Visualization Support Educators in Assessing Group Projects?

In the past years numerous software visualization tools have been introduced to support the analysis of software systems and their evolution as captured in the versioning systems. Usually the target audience of such tools comprises software engineering professionals. In this paper we argue that such tools are also beneficial for educators who need to evaluate the quality of software systems developed by students. However, since the needs of educators are different than those of the software engineering professionals, we discuss several educator needs first. We report several usage examples that we believe are useful for educators when using repository visualization tools. We illustrate them with examples from several student projects from different courses in two universities. We conclude with a series of considerations that should be heeded by both educators and future tool-builders.