YARN: Animating Software Evolution

Authors: Abram Hindle Zhen Ming Jiang Walid Koleilat Michael W. Godfrey Richard C. Holt

Venue: 2007 4th IEEE International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis , pp. 129-136, 2007

Year: 2007

Abstract: A problem that faces the study of software evolution is how to explore the aggregated and cumulative effects of changes that occur within a software system over time. In this paper we describe an approach to modeling, extracting, and animating the architectural evolution of a software system. We have built a prototype tool called YARN (yet another reverse-engineering narrative) that implements our approach; YARN mines the source code changes of the target system, and generates YARN "balls" (animations) that a viewer can unravel (watch). The animation is based on a static layout of the modules connected by animated edges that model the changing dependencies. The edges can be weighted by the number of dependencies or the importance of the change. We demonstrate our approach by visualizing the evolution of PostgreSQL DBMS.

BibTeX:

@inproceedings{abramhindle2007yase,
    author = "Abram Hindle and Zhen Ming Jiang and Walid Koleilat and Michael W. Godfrey and Richard C. Holt",
    title = "YARN: Animating Software Evolution",
    year = "2007",
    pages = "129-136",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of 2007 4th IEEE International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding and
            Analysis
        "
}

Plain Text:

Abram Hindle, Zhen Ming Jiang, Walid Koleilat, Michael W. Godfrey, and Richard C. Holt, "YARN: Animating Software Evolution," 2007 4th IEEE International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis
        , pp. 129-136