Automatic and advanced merging algorithms help programmers to merge their modifications in main development repositories. However, there is not much support to help integrators to take decisions about the integration of published merged changes into the system release. Most of the time, integrators have to read all the changed code, check the diffs to build an idea of a change, and read unchanged code to understand the context of some changes. Such a task can be overwhelming.

Torch is a software visualization tool to support integrators getting an overview and understanding of proposed changes in the context of object-oriented programming. It characterizes changes based on structural information, authors and symbolic information. Torch mixes text-based diffs with visual representation and metrics characterizing the changes.  

Torch offers a dashboard that presents different structural representations of changes using visualizations. It speeds up the access to their textual information using a diff as a fly-by-help. Torch brings semantics information to changes exploration and helps integrators to understand some characteristics of changes, such as scope, size, type of change, vocabulary involved and number of impacted entities.