Title :
How developers drive software evolution
Author :
Girba, Tudor ; Kuhn, Adrian ; Seeberger, Mauricio ; Ducasse, Stephane
Author_Institution :
Software Composition Group, Bern Univ., Switzerland
Abstract :
As systems evolve their structure change in ways not expected upfront. As time goes by, the knowledge of the developers becomes more and more critical for the process of understanding the system. That is, when we want to understand a certain issue of the system we ask the knowledgeable developers. Yet, in large systems, not every developer is knowledgeable in all the details of the system. Thus, we would want to know which developer is knowledgeable in the issue at hand. In this paper we make use of the mapping between the changes and the author identifiers (e.g., user names) provided by versioning repositories. We first define a measurement for the notion of code ownership. We use this measurement to define the ownership map visualization to understand when and how different developers interacted in which way and in which part of the system. We report the results we obtained on several large systems.
Keywords :
program visualisation; reverse engineering; software maintenance; software prototyping; code ownership; ownership map visualization; software evolution; versioning repositories; Conferences; Documentation; History; Reverse engineering; Shape; Software systems; Visualization; development process; reverse engineering; software evolution; software visualization;
Conference_Titel :
Principles of Software Evolution, Eighth International Workshop on
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-2349-8
DOI :
10.1109/IWPSE.2005.21