GitHub Commit Graph

Komal
2 min readDec 30, 2022

Using Commit Graph to reverse engineer when a new bug is introduced

Working on an application with a large team can sometimes cause merge conflicts or a new bug in the application. Once the team approves a merge request or pull request during Code Review, a new bug can occur that a developer needs to track when it was implemented that is causing the break on their branch.

GitHub has a Commit Graph feature that shows all of your teams/application commit history. Using Visual Studio Code, we can access the Commit Graph as shown in the screenshot:

By selecting on the highlighted icon shown above, this will open a new file that will show you a table off all commits with their Message, Author, and Date. If your current branch has a new error, you can create a new branch off of this table to reverse engineer when the bug appeared. This is a great start to pinpoint which commit introduced the bug.

This has been a very useful tool and saves a lot of time when tracking when a new issue occurs in our repo. Our team uses cypress for testing and I would use this feature to resolve any broken test cases.

I hope this short article comes to use that you can share with your team.

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