AniMatrix: A Matrix-Based Visualization of Software Evolution

Abstract

Software designs are ever changing to adapt to new environments and requirements. Tracking and understanding changes in modules and relationships in a software project is difficult, but even more so when the software goes through several types of changes. The typical complexity and size of software also makes it harder to grasp software evolution patterns. In this paper, we present an interactive matrix-based visualization technique that, combined with animation, depicts how software designs evolve. For example, it shows which new modules and couplings are added and removed over time. Our generic visualization supports dynamic and weighted digraphs and is applied in the context of software evolution. Analyzing source code changes is important to determine the software's structural organization and identify quality issues over time. To demonstrate our approach, we explore open-source repositories and discuss some of our findings regarding these evolving software designs.

A Taxonomy and Survey of Dynamic Graph Visualization

“…In addition to execution, another dynamic aspect of software that can be visualized is its evolution—the changes applied to software systems over time: for instance, the evolution of call, inheritance or flow graphs [CKN*03], of co‐changed files [BH06], or author–file relationships [OM08, OM09]. Evolution patterns, as described by Rufiange and Melançon [RM14], can be detected with those visualizations. Hence, software systems have different dimensions of time—execution and evolution—and relevant graph data can be derived and combined from multiple sources.…”

“…While not all combinations are sensible, there are a number of hybrid variants that appear to be promising: for instance, the combination of node‐link diagrams and matrices have already been successfully explored for static graphs [HF07, HFM07]. Recently, it has been shown that animating a matrix diagram also works if the animation process is designed with similar care as in those works describing the transition problem for node‐link diagrams (Taxonomy Category I.a.3) [RM14]. Further, combinations of animation and timeline approaches have not yet been fully explored.…”

“…While possible in theory, until recently there were no animation-based adjacency matrix approaches for visualizing the dynamic changes of a graph. Rufiange and Melançon [RM14], however, now demonstrate with their approach AniMatrix that animated matrices can be leveraged in practice, for instance, for analysing evolving designs of software systems. They use a staged animation, similar to those already discussed for node-link diagrams, to guide through the changes step by step: first, vertices and edges are removed, then existing ones are changed and finally, new ones are introduced.…”

Sense-making strategies in explorative intelligence analysis of network evolutions

“…To show temporal evolution of networks, most commonly a series of diagrams gets animated or is shown next to each other as small multiples (Archambault et al 2014;Beck et al 2014). Rufiange and Melançon's (2014) taxonomy of dynamic networks includes glyphs that show small summaries of the evolution of edges. They propose extended glyphs for the visualisation of multivariate edges (e.g.…”

Interactive Revision Exploration using Small Multiples of Software Maps

“…Where the former concentrates on streets and buildings on their sides, the latter is more similar to the software maps used in this paper. A matrix-based approach supported by animated transitions named AniMatrix supports in understanding the evolution of source code entities and their dependencies (Rufiange and Melançon, 2014). Caserta et.…”