Visualizing multiple evolution metrics

  • Authors:
  • Martin Pinzger;Harald Gall;Michael Fischer;Michele Lanza

  • Affiliations:
  • Univ. of Zurich, Switzerland;Univ. of Zurich, Switzerland;TU Vienna, Austria;Univ. of Lugano, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • SoftVis '05 Proceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on Software visualization
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Observing the evolution of very large software systems needs the analysis of large complex data models and visualization of condensed views on the system. For visualization software metrics have been used to compute such condensed views. However, current techniques concentrate on visualizing data of one particular release providing only insufficient support for visualizing data of several releases.In this paper we present the RelVis visualization approach that concentrates on providing integrated condensed graphical views on source code and release history data of up to n releases. Measures of metrics of source code entities and relationships are composed in Kiviat diagrams as annual rings. Diagrams highlight the good and bad times of an entity and facilitate the identification of entities and relationships with critical trends. They represent potential refactoring candidates that should be addressed first before further evolving the system. The paper provides needed background information and evaluation of the approach with a large open source software project.