Metric Evolution Maps: Multidimensional Attribute-driven Exploration of Software Repositories

Abstract
Understanding how software entities in a repository evolve over time is challenging, as an entity has many aspects that undergo such changes. We cast this problem in a multidimensional visualization context: First, we capture change by extracting quality metrics from all software entities in all revisions in a software repository, yielding a multidimensional time-dependent dataset. Next, we propose Metric Evolution Maps (MEMs), a new visual approach to create dynamic maps that show the similarity of entities in a revision and changes across revisions. We enrich MEMs with visual cues to show which metrics and metric values are key to formation of similar-entity patterns. Additionally, we show how entities change between revisions, and due to which metrics. We illustrate our approach by exploring changes in two real-world software repositories.
Description

        
@inproceedings{
10.2312:vmv.20161343
, booktitle = {
Vision, Modeling & Visualization
}, editor = {
Matthias Hullin and Marc Stamminger and Tino Weinkauf
}, title = {{
Metric Evolution Maps: Multidimensional Attribute-driven Exploration of Software Repositories
}}, author = {
Silva, Renato Rodrigues Oliveira da
and
Vernier, Eduardo Faccin
and
Rauber, Paulo Eduardo
and
Comba, Joao L. D.
and
Minghim, Rosane
and
Telea, Alexandru C.
}, year = {
2016
}, publisher = {
The Eurographics Association
}, ISSN = {
-
}, ISBN = {
978-3-03868-025-3
}, DOI = {
10.2312/vmv.20161343
} }
Citation
Collections