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Contribution Details

Type Conference or Workshop Paper
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Published in Proceedings Yes
Title Evo-Clocks: Software Evolution at a Glance
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Carol Alexandru
  • Sebastian Proksch
  • Pooyan Behnamghader
  • Harald C Gall
Presentation Type paper
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
Event Title 7th IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization
Event Type conference
Event Location Cleveland
Event Start Date September 30 - 2019
Event End Date October 1 - 2019
Place of Publication Cleveland, OH, USA
Publisher IEEE
Abstract Text Understanding the evolution of a project is crucial in reverse-engineering, auditing and otherwise understanding existing software. Visualizing how software evolves can be challenging, as it typically abstracts a multi-dimensional graph structure where individual components undergo frequent but localized changes. Existing approaches typically consider either only a small number of revisions or they focus on one particular aspect, such as the evolution of code metrics or architecture. Approaches using a static view with a time axis (such as line charts) are limited in their expressiveness regarding structure, and approaches visualizing structure quickly become cluttered with an increasing number of revisions and components. We propose a novel trade-off between displaying global structure over a large time period with reduced accuracy and visualizing fine-grained changes of individual components with absolute accuracy. We demonstrate how our approach displays changes by blending redundant visual features (such as scales or repeating data points) where they are not expressive. We show how using this approach to explore software evolution can reveal ephemeral information when familiarizing oneself with a new project. We provide a working implementation as an extension to our open-source library for fine-grained evolution analysis, LISA.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/VISSOFT.2019.00010
Other Identification Number merlin-id:18020
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