Interactive Visual Mechanisms for Exploring Source Code Evolution

The Visual Code Navigator (VCN) is an ongoing effort to build a visual environment for interactive visualization of large source code bases. We present two techniques that extend the previous work done on the VCN. We propose an efficient and effective mechanism for specifying and visualizing queries on the source code. Next, we show a new project evolution view that offers global insight in change correlations that span several files, and thus lets users sport possible inconsistencies, problems, or undesired project structuring. We illustrate both mechanisms using a real-life C++ source code base.