Authors:
Rodrigo Magnavita
1
;
Renato Novais
2
and
Manoel Mendonça
3
Affiliations:
1
Fraunhofer Project Center for Software and Systems Engineering, Federal University of Bahia and SENAI/CIMATEC, Brazil
;
2
Federal Institute of Bahia, Brazil
;
3
Federal University of Bahia, Brazil
Keyword(s):
Software Visualization, Software Evolution, Software Comprehension, Software Engineering.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Artificial Intelligence
;
Data Mining
;
Databases and Information Systems Integration
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Sensor Networks
;
Signal Processing
;
Soft Computing
;
Software Engineering
;
Software Metrics and Measurement
;
Tools, Techniques and Methodologies for System Development
Abstract:
Software evolution produces large amounts of data which software engineers need to understand for their
daily activities. The use of software visualization constitutes a promising approach to help them comprehend
multiple aspects of the evolving software. However, portraying all the data is not an easy task as there are
many dimensions to the data (e.g. time, files, properties) to be considered. This paper presents a new software
visualization metaphor inspired by concentric waves, which gives information about the software evolution
in different levels of detail. This new metaphor is able to portray large amount of data and may also be
used to consider different dimensions of the data. It uses the concepts of the formation of concentric waves
to map software evolution data generated during the waves formation life cycle. The metaphor is useful for
exploring and identifying certain patterns in the software evolution. To evaluate its applicability, we conducted
an exploratory study to
show how the visualization can quickly answer different questions asked by software
engineers when evolving their software.
(More)