Interactive Exploration of Co-evolving Software Entities

Frequent changes to groups of software entities belonging to different parts of the system may indicate structural issues in the system’s decomposition. An in-depth analysis of such groups of entities is needed to understand the underly- ing reasons for co-changes, and also determine how to resolve the issues. To date, static visualizations have been proposed to identify possible structural issues in software systems, but they help only to a certain extent. In this paper we discuss how interactive visualizations can further support the process of analyzing the identified structural issues. We implemented a tool that interactively visualizes software evolution and applied it to a large embedded software system having a development history of more than a decade. Our experience in using the tool along with the architects and developers suggests that interactivity adds much value when analyzing groups of co-changed software entities