An interactive differential and temporal approach to visually analyze software evolution

Author

Novais, Renato L. ; Lima, Caio A N ; de F Carneiro, G. ; Paulo, R.M.S. ; Mendonça, Manoel

Author_Institution

Comput. Sci. Dept., Fed. Univ. of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil

fYear

2011

fDate

29-30 Sept. 2011

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

4

Abstract

Software evolution is one of the most important topics in modern software engineering research. It deals with complex information and large amounts of data. Software visualization can be helpful in this scenario, helping to summarize, analyze and understand software evolution data. This paper presents SourceMiner Evolution (SME), a software tool that uses an interactive differential and temporal approach to visualize software evolution. The tool is implemented as an Eclipse plug-in and has four views that are assembled directly from the IDE AST. The views portray the software from different perspectives. One view shows how metrics of a chosen software entity evolves over time. The other three views show differential comparisons of any two versions of a system structure, dependency and inheritance properties.

Keywords

data visualisation; program visualisation; software maintenance; software metrics; Eclipse plug-in; IDE AST; SourceMiner Evolution; interactive differential approach; interactive temporal approach; software engineering research; software entity; software evolution analysis visualization; software tool; Color; Couplings; Data visualization; Measurement; Software; Software engineering; Visualization; Software evolution; Software visualization; differential views; multi-perspectives;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis (VISSOFT), 2011 6th IEEE International Workshop on

Conference_Location

Williamsburg, VA

Print_ISBN

978-1-4577-0822-0

Electronic_ISBN

978-1-4577-0821-3

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/VISSOF.2011.6069460

Filename

6069460