Using EVOWAVE to analyze software evolution

Software evolution produces large amounts of data which software engineers need to understand for their daily activities. The use of software visualization constitutes a promising approach to help them comprehend multiple aspects of the evolving software. However, portraying all the data is not an easy task as there are many dimensions to the data (e.g. time, files, properties) to be considered. This paper presents a new software visualization metaphor inspired by concentric waves, which gives information about the software evolution in different levels of detail. This new metaphor is able to portray large amount of data and may also be used to consider different dimensions of the data. It uses the concepts of the formation of concentric waves to map software evolution data generated during the waves formation life cycle. The metaphor is useful for exploring and identifying certain patterns in the software evolution. To evaluate its applicability, we conducted an exploratory study to show how the visualization can quickly answer different questions asked by software engineers when evolving their software.