A domain-specific language to visualize software evolution

Abstract

Context: Accurately relating code authorship to commit frequency over multiple software revisions is a complex task. Most of the navigation tools found in common source code versioning clients are often too rigid to formulate specific queries and adequately present results of such queries. Questions related to evolution asked by software engineers are therefore challenging at answering using common Git clients.

Objective: This paper explores the use of stacked adjacency matrices and a domain specific language to produce tailored interactive visualizations for software evolution exploration. We are able to support some classical software evolution tasks using short and concise scripts using our language.

Method: We propose a domain-specific language to stack adjacency matrices and produce scalable and interactive visualizations. Our language and visualizations are evaluated using two independent controlled experiments and closely observing participants.

Results: We made the following findings: (i) participants are able to express sophisticated queries using our domain-specific language and visualizations, (ii) participants perform better than GitHub's visualizations to answer a set of questions.

Conclusion: Our visual and scripting environment performs better than GitHub's visualizations at extracting software evolution information.