Version-Centric Visualization of Code Evolution

Files

223-230.pdf (3.08 MB)

Date

2005

Authors

Voinea, S. Lucian
Telea, Alexandru
Chaudron, Michel

Publisher

The Eurographics Association

Abstract

The source code of software systems changes many times during the system lifecycle. We study how developers can get insight in these changes in order to understand the project context and the product artifacts. For this we propose new techniques for code evolution representation and visualization interaction from a version-centric perspective. Central to our approach is a line-based display of the changing code, where each file version is shown as a column and the horizontal axis shows time. We propose a version centric layout of line representations and a constrained interaction scheme that makes it easy to navigate. Additionally, we describe a cushion based technique to enhance visualization with information about stable evolution areas. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach on real- life data sets.

        @inproceedings{:10.2312/VisSym/EuroVis05/223-230
,
booktitle = {EUROVIS 2005: Eurographics / IEEE VGTC Symposium on Visualization
},
editor = {Ken Brodlie and David Duke and Ken Joy
},
title = {{Version-Centric Visualization of Code Evolution
}},
author = {Voinea, S. Lucian and 
Telea, Alexandru and 
Chaudron, Michel
},
year = {2005
},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association
},
ISSN = {1727-5296
},
ISBN = {3-905673-19-3
},
DOI = {/10.2312/VisSym/EuroVis05/223-230
}
}