Article

CVSscan: visualization of code evolution

Authors:

Lucian Voinea,

Alex Telea,

Jarke J. van WijkAuthors Info & Claims

SoftVis '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on Software visualization

Pages 47 - 56

https://doi.org/10.1145/1056018.1056025

Published: 14 May 2005 Publication History

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Abstract

During the life cycle of a software system, the source code is changed many times. We study how developers can be enabled to get insight in these changes, in order to understand the status, history and structure better, as well as for instance the roles played by various contributors. We present CVSscan, an integrated multiview environment for this. Central is a line-oriented display of the changing code, where each version is represented by a column, and where the horizontal direction is used for time, Separate linked displays show various metrics, as well as the source code itself. A large variety of options is provided to visualize a number of different aspects. Informal user studies demonstrate the efficiency of this approach for real world use cases.

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CVSscan: visualization of code evolution

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Reviews

Reviewer: James Edward Tomayko

According to the authors, 90 percent of the cost of software is in maintenance, so they decide to make their contribution there. They use a visualization technique based on lines of pixels (for lines of code) and color (for types of change). They also carefully consider the number of dimensions, settling on two. They use a concurrent versions system (CVS) repository for data, figuring that it automatically keeps all changes, and has a diff command of its own. The authors report on two informal case studies, one of a Perl file and one of a C file. They hope to eventually show multi-file visualization. From a visualization standpoint, this paper is limited, being only for CVS. However, the visualization is quite clear, and there are some attempts made for it to be used elsewhere. People interested in making software evolution easier to understand can benefit from reading and applying the ideas in this paper. Online Computing Reviews Service

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Published In

SoftVis '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on Software visualization

May 2005

211 pages

ISBN:1595930736

DOI:10.1145/1056018

Program Chairs:
Tom Naps
University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh, USA
,
Wim De Pauw
IBM Research, USA

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 14 May 2005

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SOFTVIS05: ACM Symposium on Software Visualization SOFTVIS 2005

May 14 - 15, 2005

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Güthing LBittner PSchaefer IThüm T(2024)Explaining Edits to Variability Annotations in Evolving Software Product LinesProceedings of the 18th International Working Conference on Variability Modelling of Software-Intensive Systems10.1145/3634713.3634725(93-102)Online publication date: 7-Feb-2024
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Controlling Software Evolution Process Using Code Smell Visualization

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Controlling Software Evolution Process Using Code Smell Visualization

Incremental exploratory visualization of relationships in large codebases for program comprehension

Identifying Code Smells with Multiple Concern Views

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