On the Use of Software Visualization to Analyze Software Evolution: An Interactive Differential Approach

Software evolution is one of the most important topics in modern software engineering research. This activity requires the analysis of large amounts of data describing the current software system structure as well as its previous history. Software visualization can be helpful in this scenario, as it can summarize this complex data into easy to interpret visual scenarios. This paper presents an interactive differential approach for visualizing software evolution. The approach builds multi-view structural descriptions of a software system directly from its source code, and uses colors to differentiate it from any other previous version. This differential approach is highly interactive allowing the user to quickly brush over many pairs of versions of the system. As a proof of concept, we used the approach to analyze eight versions of an open source system and found out it was useful to quickly identify hot spot and code smell candidates in them.