Visually Summarising Software Change

Many authors have noted the problem of excessive information when attempting to create useful visualisations of software. The problem of visualising change over multiple versions of software is more complex still. We present a means of visualising changes in software, founded on information-theoretic arguments, that easily and automatically summarises difference between software versions with respect to their code, their structure or their behaviour. Further, we show, by creating visualisations in experiments on real-world data, that the method is of utility to practitioners and has implications beyond the field of software visualisation.