Software evolution analysis is concerned with analysis of artifacts produced during a software systems life-cycle. Execution traces produced from instrumented code reflect a system’s actual implementation. This information can be used to recover interaction patterns between different entities
such as methods, files, or modules. Some solutions for detection of patterns and their visualization exist, but are limited to small amounts of data and are incapable of comparing data from different versions of a large software system. In this paper, we propose a methodology to analyze and compare the execution traces of different versions of a software system to provide insights into its evolution. We recover high-level module views that facilitate the comprehension of each module’s evolution. Our methodology allows us to track the evolution of particular modules and present the findings in three different kinds of visualizations. Based on these graphical representations, the evolution of the concerned modules can be tracked and comprehended much more effectively. Our EvoTrace approach uses standard database technology and instrumentation facilities of development tools, so exchanging data with other analyses is facilitated. Further, we show the applicability of our approach using the Mozilla open source system consisting of about 2 million lines of C/C++ code.
By: M. Fischer; J. Oberleitner; H. Gall; Thomas Gschwind
Published in: Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Program Comprehension (IWPC '05) Washington, DC, IEEE, p.237-246 in 2005
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