Comparing Analyses

When making changes to a branch, it can be valuable to compare the impact of those changes relative to earlier versions of the branch, or of other branches. The Show Comparisons feature helps you to do that.

To show how this works, we will analyze the mainnet branch for the Thunder project. Once that analysis completes we click on the Review icon on the Navigator page to open the Summary page as described in Reviewing Your Results.

This is the result of the analysis of the mainnet branch. We can now compare this with the results on the master branch done previously. This feature is handy when there are multiple branches in development and a developer may wish to compare their changes with some baseline or another developing branch. Note the button labeled Show Comparisons. This allows you to compare this analysis with another one done previously.

Click on the Show Comparisons button to bring up the list of other possible branches against which to compare. For our example here, we see only one other option, the master branch. In more advanced cases, the list would display many other branch analyses for comparison.

NOTE: The branch from which the comparison is being initiated, mainnet, is not displayed as an option for comparison. This is either because there are no other analyses to compare with or any previous analyses are from the same version of the code (same commit hash). In these cases, since there is nothing to compare, they are not offered.

To choose the alternate branch for comparison, click on the desired branch entry. Since there may have been more than one previous analysis performed on a particular branch, the next step is to choose which analysis session from that branch is desired. Typically, the most recent analysis is offered by default, but you can scroll down through the list to see the various sessions. In our example, we see the 2 previous analyses on the master branch.

If there are many possible choices, you can narrow the selection using the Default pull-down menu. Clicking on it reveals the search options.

We'll choose the Search by session id to show how this works. We enter 2 in the search field and click Submit. Now, only Session ID 2 shows up.

Then we click on Apply to reveal the comparison.

The comparison view is the same as for viewing the results of a complete analysis as shown in Reviewer Summary and Filters. However, in this case, only the bugs that are disjoint from the alternate analysis are displayed. In our example, we can see the 3 bugs that were detected in the mainnet branch that were NOT in the master branch's second analysis.

Using the Show Comparisons feature may prove useful to a developer by comparing results from earlier versions of the same branch that were done at earlier points in the development. This allows the devleloper to determine if recent code changes have either fixed older bugs or introduced new ones.