Evolution Storyboards: Visualization of Software Structure Dynamics

Abstract

Large software systems have a rich development history. Mining certain aspects of this rich history can reveal interesting insights into the system and its structure. Previous approaches to visualize the evolution of software systems provide static views. These static views often do not fully capture the dynamic nature of evolution. We introduce the evolution storyboard, a visualization which provides dynamic views of the evolution of a software's structure. Our tool implementation takes as input a series of software graphs, e.g., call graphs or co-change graphs, and automatically generates an evolution storyboard. To illustrate the concept, we present a storyboard for PostgreSQL, as a representative example for large open source systems. Evolution storyboards help to understand a system's structure and to reveal its possible decay over time. The storyboard highlights important changes in the structure during the lifetime of a software system, and how artifacts changed their dependencies over time