Telling Stories about Software Evolution

Abstract

Software systems evolve over time. The software development community is losing a great deal of information about the systems we create because of the way we currently record history. This paper argues that we need to capture more fine-grained historical information, like the kind that spreads in a pair programming session, and use it to tell stories about how software systems evolve over time. The paper describes a tool that is currently in development that hopes to achieve this goal.