Improved maintenance support by multi-version visualizations

The author proposes a set of visualizing techniques exploiting versioning information easily accessible in a software repository. The novel contribution is the active use of version information. The author uses the term multiversion visualizations, since a visual representation containing information aggregated from several versions of the software is computed. The proposed techniques are applicable both in a programming-in-the-large perspective and in the detailed coding phases. It is argued that these methods can be used to improve the support for maintenance of large, evolving program systems. A prototype currently being implemented featuring some of these techniques is briefly mentioned