Lucian Voinea

CVSscan: visualization of code evolution

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.

An open framework for CVS repository querying, analysis and visualization

We present an open framework for visual mining of CVS software repositories. We address three aspects: data extraction, analysis and visualization. We first discuss the challenges of CVS data extraction and storage, and propose a flexible way to deal with CVS implementation inconsistencies. We next present a new technique to enrich the raw data with information about artifacts showing similar evolution. Finally, we propose a visualization backend and show its applicability on industry-size repositories.

An interactive reverse engineering environment for large-scale C++ code

Few toolsets for reverse-engineering and understanding of C++ code provide parsing and fact extraction, querying, analysis and code metrics, navigation, and visualization of source-code-level facts in a way which is as easy-to-use as integrated development environments (IDEs) are for forward engineering. We present an interactive reverse-engineering environment (IRE) for C and C++ which allows to set up the fact extraction process, apply user-written queries and metrics, and visualize combined query results, metrics, code text, and code structure. Our IRE tightly couples a fast, tolerant C++ fact extractor, an open query system, and several scalable dense-pixel visualizations in a novel way, offering an easy way to analyze and examine large code bases. We illustrate our IRE with several examples, focusing on the added value of the integrated, visual reverse-engineering approach.

The Solid* toolset for software visual analytics of program structure and metrics comprehension: From research prototype to product

Software visual analytics (SVA) tools combine static program analysis and fact extraction with information visualization to support program comprehension. However, building efficient and effective SVA tools is highly challenging, as it involves extensive software development in program analysis, graphics, information visualization, and interaction. We present a SVA toolset for software maintenance, and detail two of its components which target software structure, metrics and code duplication. We illustrate the toolsets usage for constructing software visualizations with examples in education, research, and industrial contexts. We discuss the design evolution from research prototypes to integrated, scalable, and easy-to-use products, and present several guidelines for the development of efficient and effective SVA solutions.

Visual querying and analysis of large software repositories

We present a software framework for mining software repositories. Our extensible framework enables the integration of data extraction from repositories with data analysis and interactive visualization. We demonstrate the applicability of the framework by presenting several case studies performed on industry-size software repositories. In each study we use the framework to give answers to one or several software engineering questions addressing a specific project. Next, we validate the answers by comparing them with existing project documentation, by interviewing domain experts and by detailed analyses of the source code. The results show that our framework can be used both for supporting case studies on mining software repository techniques and for building end-user tools for software maintenance support.

Visual Tools for Software Architecture Understanding: A Stakeholder Perspective

This paper is talking about visual tools for understanding software architecture.Software visualisation tool operates as a pipeline.They mine data from various sources and then analyse the data using various techniques like static analyzers, text miners, repository access clients, and database clients. A refined-fact database stores the analysis results, using an entity-relationship.

Mining software repositories with CVSgrab

In this paper we address the process and team analysis categories of the MSR Mining Challenge 2006. We use our CVSgrab tool to acquire the data and interactively visualize the evolution of ArgoUML and PostgreSQL, in order to answer three relevant questions. We conclude summarizing the strong and weak points of using CVSgrab for mining large software repositories.

Case study: Visual analytics in software product assessments

We present how a combination of static source code analysis, repository analysis, and visualization techniques has been used to effectively get and communicate insight in the development and project management problems of a large industrial code base. This study is an example of how visual analytics can be effectively applied to answer maintenance questions and support decision making in the software industry. We comment on the relevant findings during the study both in terms of used technique and applied methodology and outline the favorable factors that were essential in making this type of assessment successful within tight time and budget constraints.

Visual Analytics in Software Maintenance : Challenges and Opportunities

Visual analytics (VA) is an emerging science at the crossroads of data and information visualization, graphics, data mining, and knowledge representation, with many successful applications in engineering, business and finance, security, geosciences, and e-governance and health. Tools using visualization, data mining, and data analysis are also prominently present in a different field: software maintenance. However, an integrated VA is relatively new for this field. In this paper, we discuss the specific challenges and particularities of applying VA in software engineering, highlight the added value of a VA approach, as distilled by us from several large-scale software engineering industrial projects.

A framework for interactive visualization of component-based software

We advocate the use of visual tooling for the development and maintenance of component-based software systems. Our contribution is twofold. First, we demonstrate how an interactive visualization tool effectively supports understanding large component based software. Secondly, we show how to design such a tool in order to make it applicable for a wide range of component systems and investigation goals. We demonstrate our approach by several visualization scenarios for real-world systems.