Co-change visualization applied to PostgreSQL and ArgoUML: (MSR challenge report)

ABSTRACT

Co-change visualization is a method to recover the subsystem structure of a software system from the version history, based on common changes and visual clustering. This paper presents the results of applying the tool CCVisu which implements co-change visualization, to the two open-source software systems PostgreSQL and ArgoUML The input of the method is the co-change graph, which can be easily extracted by CCVisu from a Cvs version repository. The output is a graph layout that places software artifacts that were often commonly changed at close positions, and artifacts that were rarely co-changed at distant positions. This property of the layout is due to the clustering property of the underlying energy model,which evaluates the quality of a produced layout. The layout can be displayed on the screen, or saved to a file in SVG or VRML format.

REFERENCES

• 1: D. Beyer. Co-change visualization. In Proc. ICSM'05, Industrial and Tool volume pages 89--92, 2005.
• 2: Dirk Beyer , Andreas Noack, Clustering Software Artifacts Based on Frequent Common Changes, Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Program Comprehension, p.259-268, May 15-16, 2005 [doi>10.1109/WPC.2005.12]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.7 Distribution, Maintenance, and Enhancement
          Subjects: Restructuring, reverse engineering, and reengineering

General Terms:
Design

Keywords:
force-directed graph layout, software clustering, software structure analysis, software visualization