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Evolution Storyboards: Visualization of Software Structure Dynamics
Athens, Greece June 14-June 16
DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/ICPC.2006.2114th IEEE International Conference on ...
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Dirk Beyer, EPFL, Switzerland
Ahmed E. Hassan, Research In Motion, Canada
Large software systems have a rich development history. Mining certain aspects of this rich history can reveal interesting insights into the system and its structure. Previous approaches to visualize the evolution of software systems provide static views. These static views often do not fully capture the dynamic nature of evolution. We introduce the Evolution Storyboard, a visualization which provides dynamic views of the evolution of a software?s structure. Our tool implementation takes as input a series of software graphs, e.g., call graphs or co-change graphs, and automatically generates an evolution storyboard. To illustrate the concept, we present a storyboard for PostgreSQL, as a representative example for large open source systems. Evolution storyboards help to understand a system?s structure and to reveal its possible decay over time. The storyboard highlights important changes in the structure during the lifetime of a software system, and how artifacts changed their dependencies over time.
Index Terms:
Software evolution, reengineering, software visualization, software clustering, software structure analysis, dependency analysis, force-directed graph layout
Citation:
Dirk Beyer, Ahmed E. Hassan, "Evolution Storyboards: Visualization of Software Structure Dynamics," icpc, pp.248-251, 14th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC'06), 2006
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