ON THE USE OF SOFTWARE VISUALIZATION TO ANALYZE SOFTWARE EVOLUTION - An Interactive Differential Approach

Renato Lima Novais, Glauco de F. Carneiro, Paulo R. M. Simões Júnior, Manoel Gomes Mendonça

2011

Abstract

Software evolution is one of the most important topics in modern software engineering research. This activity requires the analysis of large amounts of data describing the current software system structure as well as its previous history. Software visualization can be helpful in this scenario, as it can summarize this complex data into easy to interpret visual scenarios. This paper presents a interactive differential approach for visualizing software evolution. The approach builds multi-view structural descriptions of a software system directly from its source code, and uses colors to differentiate it from any other previous version. This differential approach is highly interactive allowing the user to quickly brush over many pairs of versions of the system. As a proof of concept, we used the approach to analyze eight versions of an open source system and found out it was useful to quickly identify hot spot and code smell candidates in them.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Lima Novais R., de F. Carneiro G., R. M. Simões Júnior P. and Gomes Mendonça M. (2011). ON THE USE OF SOFTWARE VISUALIZATION TO ANALYZE SOFTWARE EVOLUTION - An Interactive Differential Approach . In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 3: ICEIS, ISBN 978-989-8425-55-3, pages 15-24. DOI: 10.5220/0003430700150024

in Bibtex Style

@conference{iceis11,
author={Renato Lima Novais and Glauco de F. Carneiro and Paulo R. M. Simões Júnior and Manoel Gomes Mendonça},
title={ON THE USE OF SOFTWARE VISUALIZATION TO ANALYZE SOFTWARE EVOLUTION - An Interactive Differential Approach},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 3: ICEIS,},
year={2011},
pages={15-24},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0003430700150024},
isbn={978-989-8425-55-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 3: ICEIS,
TI - ON THE USE OF SOFTWARE VISUALIZATION TO ANALYZE SOFTWARE EVOLUTION - An Interactive Differential Approach
SN - 978-989-8425-55-3
AU - Lima Novais R.
AU - de F. Carneiro G.
AU - R. M. Simões Júnior P.
AU - Gomes Mendonça M.
PY - 2011
SP - 15
EP - 24
DO - 10.5220/0003430700150024