A File Based Visualization of Software Evolution

Software Configuration Management systems are important instruments for supporting development of large software projects. They accumulate large amounts of evolution data that can be used for process accounting and auditing. We study how visualization can help developers and managers to get insight in this unstructured history information. To this end, we propose several new techniques for visual mining of software evolution. Central to our approach is a file-based evolution visualization, where each project is shown as a set of horizontal stripes depicting files along the time axis. We propose several mechanisms for interactively building layouts in this display, and for correlating the evolution with the results of various software metrics. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach on real-life data sets.