Lucian Voinea
ABSTRACT
During the life cycle of a software system, the source code is changed many times. We study how developers can be enabled to get insight in these changes, in order to understand the status, history and structure better, as well as for instance the roles played by various contributors. We present CVSscan, an integrated multiview environment for this. Central is a line-oriented display of the changing code, where each version is represented by a column, and where the horizontal direction is used for time, Separate linked displays show various metrics, as well as the source code itself. A large variety of options is provided to visualize a number of different aspects. Informal user studies demonstrate the efficiency of this approach for real world use cases.
- Beck, K. and Andres, C. 2004, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (2nd Edition). Addison-Wesley Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Collberg, C., Kobourov, S., Nagra, J., Pitts, J. and Wampler, K. 2003. A System for Graph-Based Visualization of the Evolution of Software, Proc. ACM SoftVis '03, ACM Press, NY, USA, 77--86. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Cormen, T. Leiserson, C. and Rivest, R. 1996. Introduction to Algorithms, 16th edition, MIT Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Eick, S. G., Steffen, J. L. and Sumner, E. E. 1992. SeeSoft --A Tool for Visualizing Line Oriented Software Statistics. IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering, 18(11), 957--968. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Eiglsperger, M., Kaufmann, M. and Siebenhaller, M. A 2003. Topology-Shape-Metrics Approach for the Automatic Layout of UML, Class Diagrams. In Proc. ACM SoftViz '03, ACM Press, NY, USA, 189--198. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Erlikh, L. 2000. Leveraging Legacy System Dollars for E-business.(IEEE) IT Pro, May-June, 17--23. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Froehlich, J. and Dourish, P. 2004. Unifying Artifacts and Activities in a Visual Tool for Distributed Software Development Teams, In Proc. ICSE '04, IEEE CS Press, Washington DC, USA, 387--396. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Griswold, W. G., Yuan, J. J. and Kato, Y. 2001. Exploiting the Map Metaphor in a Tool for Software Evolution. Proc. ICSE '01, IEEE CS Press, Washington DC, USA, 265--274. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gutwenger, C., Junger, M., Klein, K., Kupke, J., Leipert, S. and Mutzel, P. 2003. A New Approach for Visualizing UML Class Diagrams, Proc. ACM SoftViz '03, ACM Press, NY, USA, 179--188. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jones, J. A., Harrold, M. J. and Stasko, J. 2002. Visualization of Test Information to Assist Fault Localization. Proc. ICSE'02, ACM Press, NY, USA, 467--477. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Maletic, J. I., Marcus, A. and Collard, M. L. 2002. A Task Oriented View of Software Visualization. Proc. IEEE VISSOFT '02, IEEE CS Press, Washington DC, USA, 32--40. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Marcus, A., Feng, L. and Maletic, J. I. 2003. 3D Representations for Software Visualization. In Proc. ACM SoftVis '03, ACM Press NY, USA, 2003, 27--36. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Reiss, S. P. 2001. Bee/Hive: A Software Visualization Back End. In Proc. of the Workshop on Software Visualization, ICSE '01, 44--48.Google Scholar
- Seacord, R. C., Plakosh, D. and Lewis, G. 2003. A. Modernizing Legacy Systems: Software Technologies, Engineering Process, and Business Practices. Addision-Wesley, SEI Series in Software Engineering. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Shneidermann, B. 1996. The Eyes Have It: A Task by Data Type Taxonomy for Information Visualization. Proc. IEEE Symp. on Visual Languages (VL '96), IEEE CS Press, Washington DC, USA, 336--343 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sommerville, I. 2000. Software Engineering (6th edition). Addison-Wesley Google ScholarDigital Library
- Standish, T. A. 1984. An Essay on Software Reuse. IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering, 10 (5), Sep., 494--497.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Storey, M. A., Best, C., Michaud, J., Rayside, D., Litoiu, M. and Musen, M. 2002. SHriMP Views: an Interactive Environment for Information Visualization and Navigation. Proc. CHI'02, ACM Press, NY, 520--521. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Telea, A., MacCari, A. and Riva, C. 2002. An Open Toolkit for Prototyping Reverse Engineering Visualization. In Proc. IEEE VisSym '02, The Eurographics Association, Aire-la-Ville, Switzerland, 241--251. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Tilley, S. R., Wong, K., Storey M. A. D. and Muller, H. A. 1994. Rigi: A visual tool for understanding legacy systems. In International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, DecemberGoogle Scholar
Index Terms
- CVSscan: visualization of code evolution
Recommendations
Controlling Software Evolution Process Using Code Smell Visualization
ICCCV '19: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Control and Computer VisionSoftware change is inevitable, evolution becomes a part of software lifetime, and software release becomes more frequent. Hence there is a need for the project manager to inspect and control the process during software development and evolution. In the ...
Incremental exploratory visualization of relationships in large codebases for program comprehension
OOPSLA '05: Companion to the 20th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applicationsAs software systems grow in size and use more third-party libraries and frameworks, the need for developers to understand unfamiliar large codebases is rapidly increasing. In this poster, we present a tool, Relo that supports users' understanding by ...
Identifying Code Smells with Multiple Concern Views
SBES '10: Proceedings of the 2010 Brazilian Symposium on Software EngineeringCode smells are anomalies often caused by the way concerns are realized in the source code. Their identification might depend on properties governing the structure of individual concerns and their inter-dependencies in the system implementation. ...
Reviews
James Edward Tomayko
According to the authors, 90 percent of the cost of software is in maintenance, so they decide to make their contribution there. They use a visualization technique based on lines of pixels (for lines of code) and color (for types of change). They also carefully consider the number of dimensions, settling on two. They use a concurrent versions system (CVS) repository for data, figuring that it automatically keeps all changes, and has a diff command of its own. The authors report on two informal case studies, one of a Perl file and one of a C file. They hope to eventually show multi-file visualization. From a visualization standpoint, this paper is limited, being only for CVS. However, the visualization is quite clear, and there are some attempts made for it to be used elsewhere. People interested in making software evolution easier to understand can benefit from reading and applying the ideas in this paper. Online Computing Reviews Service
Access critical reviews of Computing literature here
Become a reviewer for Computing Reviews.
Comments