Resolving unwanted couplings through interactive exploration of co-evolving software entities – An experience report

Context nt changes to groups of software entities belonging to different parts of the system may indicate unwanted couplings between those parts. Visualizations of co-changing software entities have been proposed to help developers identify unwanted couplings. Identifying unwanted couplings, however, is only the first step towards an important goal of a software architect: to improve the decomposition of the software system. An in-depth analysis of co-changing entities is needed to understand the underlying reasons for co-changes, and also determine how to resolve the issues. ive s paper we discuss how interactive visualizations can support the process of analyzing the identified unwanted couplings. lied a tool that interactively visualizes software evolution in 10 working sessions with architects and developers of a large embedded software system having a development history of more than a decade. s rticipants of the working sessions were overall very positive about their experiences with the interactive visualizations. In 70% of the cases investigated, a decision could be taken on how to resolve the unwanted couplings. sion perience suggests that interactive visualization not only helps to identify unwanted couplings but it also helps experts to reason about and resolve them.