Leveraging Traceability to Reveal the Tapestry of Quality Concerns in Source Code

Abstract

Software quality concerns, related to attributes such as reliability, security, and performance, are realized through a series of architectural decisions impacting the choice of frameworks, styles, tactics, and even high-level design patterns. These decisions are often undocumented and, as a result, developers maybe unaware of the relationship between various sections of the code and quality concerns. In this paper we utilize an existing classifier to detect architectural tactics in code, and then present three different visualization techniques for visualizing the impact of quality concerns on code. We demonstrate our approach against the Cassandra database system and show that our visualizations offer potentially useful perspectives on the tapestry of quality concerns woven throughout the code.