An interactive differential and temporal approach to visually analyze software evolution

Abstract

Software evolution is one of the most important topics in modern software engineering research. It deals with complex information and large amounts of data. Software visualization can be helpful in this scenario, helping to summarize, analyze and understand software evolution data. This paper presents SourceMiner Evolution (SME), a software tool that uses an interactive differential and temporal approach to visualize software evolution. The tool is implemented as an Eclipse plug-in and has four views that are assembled directly from the IDE AST. The views portray the software from different perspectives. One view shows how metrics of a chosen software entity evolves over time. The other three views show differential comparisons of any two versions of a system structure, dependency and inheritance properties.