Some issues in the 'archaeology' of software evolution

During a software project's lifetime, the software goes through many changes, as components are added, removed and modified to fix bugs and add new features. This paper is intended as a lightweight introduction to some of the issues arising from an `archaeological' investigation of software evolution. We use our own work to look at some of the challenges faced, techniques used, findings obtained, and lessons learnt when measuring and visualising the historical changes that happen during the evolution of software

Some issues in the 'archaeology' of software evolution

During a software project's lifetime, the software goes through many changes, as components are added, removed and modified to fix bugs and add new features. This paper is intended as a lightweight introduction to some of the issues arising from an `archaeological' investigation of software evolution. We use our own work to look at some of the challenges faced, techniques used, findings obtained, and lessons learnt when measuring and visualising the historical changes that happen during the evolution of software

Visual querying and analysis of large software repositories

We present a software framework for mining software repositories. Our extensible framework enables the integration of data extraction from repositories with data analysis and interactive visualization. We demonstrate the applicability of the framework by presenting several case studies performed on industry-size software repositories. In each study we use the framework to give answers to one or several software engineering questions addressing a specific project. Next, we validate the answers by comparing them with existing project documentation, by interviewing domain experts and by detailed analyses of the source code. The results show that our framework can be used both for supporting case studies on mining software repository techniques and for building end-user tools for software maintenanc

CHORUS Deliverable 3.4: Vision Document

The goal of the CHORUS Vision Document is to create a high level vision on audio-visual search engines in order to give guidance to the future R&D work in this area and to highlight trends and challenges in this domain. The vision of CHORUS is strongly connected to the CHORUS Roadmap Document (D2.3). A concise document integrating the outcomes of the two deliverables will be prepared for the end of the project (NEM Summit)

Assessing architectural evolution: A case study

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 SpringerThis paper proposes to use a historical perspective on generic laws, principles, and guidelines, like Lehman’s software evolution laws and Martin’s design principles, in order to achieve a multi-faceted process and structural assessment of a system’s architectural evolution. We present a simple structural model with associated historical metrics and visualizations that could form part of an architect’s dashboard. We perform such an assessment for the Eclipse SDK, as a case study of a large, complex, and long-lived system for which sustained effective architectural evolution is paramount. The twofold aim of checking generic principles on a well-know system is, on the one hand, to see whether there are certain lessons that could be learned for best practice of architectural evolution, and on the other hand to get more insights about the applicability of such principles. We find that while the Eclipse SDK does follow several of the laws and principles, there are some deviations, and we discuss areas of architectural improvement and limitations of the assessment approach

Data-Driven Decisions and Actions in Today’s Software Development

Today’s software development is all about data: data about the software product itself, about the process and its different stages, about the customers and markets, about the development, the testing, the integration, the deployment, or the runtime aspects in the cloud. We use static and dynamic data of various kinds and quantities to analyze market feedback, feature impact, code quality, architectural design alternatives, or effects of performance optimizations. Development environments are no longer limited to IDEs in a desktop application or the like but span the Internet using live programming environments such as Cloud9 or large-volume repositories such as BitBucket, GitHub, GitLab, or StackOverflow. Software development has become “live” in the cloud, be it the coding, the testing, or the experimentation with different product options on the Internet. The inherent complexity puts a further burden on developers, since they need to stay alert when constantly switching between tasks in different phases. Research has been analyzing the development process, its data and stakeholders, for decades and is working on various tools that can help developers in their daily tasks to improve the quality of their work and their productivity. In this chapter, we critically reflect on the challenges faced by developers in a typical release cycle, identify inherent problems of the individual phases, and present the current state of the research that can help overcome these issues

Change-centric improvement of team collaboration

In software development, teamwork is essential to the successful delivery of a final product. The software industry has historically built software utilizing development teams that share the workplace. Process models, tools, and methodologies have been enhanced to support the development of software in a collocated setting. However, since the dawn of the 21st century, this scenario has begun to change: an increasing number of software companies are adopting global software development to cut costs and speed up the development process. Global software development introduces several challenges for the creation of quality software, from the adaptation of current methods, tools, techniques, etc., to new challenges imposed by the distributed setting, including physical and cultural distance between teams, communication problems, and coordination breakdowns. A particular challenge for distributed teams is the maintenance of a level of collaboration naturally present in collocated teams. Collaboration in this situation naturally d r ops due to low awareness of the activity of the team. Awareness is intrinsic to a collocated team, being obtained through human interaction such as informal conversation or meetings. For a distributed team, however, geographical distance and a subsequent lack of human interaction negatively impact this awareness. This dissertation focuses on the improvement of collaboration, especially within geographically dispersed teams. Our thesis is that by modeling the evolution of a software system in terms of fine-grained changes, we can produce a detailed history that may be leveraged to help developers collaborate. To validate this claim, we first c r eate a model to accurately represent the evolution of a system as sequences of fine- grained changes. We proceed to build a tool infrastructure able to capture and store fine-grained changes for both immediate and later use. Upon this foundation, we devise and evaluate a number of applications for our work with two distinct goals: 1. To assist developers with real-time information about the activity of the team. These applications aim to improve developers’ awareness of team member activity that can impact their work. We propose visualizations to notify developers of ongoing change activity, as well as a new technique for detecting and informing developers about potential emerging conflicts. 2. To help developers satisfy their needs for information related to the evolution of the software system. These applications aim to exploit the detailed change history generated by our approach in order to help developers find answers to questions arising during their work. To this end, we present two new measurements of code expertise, and a novel approach to replaying past changes according to user-defined criteria. We evaluate the approach and applications by adopting appropriate empirical methods for each case. A total of two case studies – one controlled experiment, and one qualitative user study – are reported. The results provide evidence that applications leveraging a fine-grained change history of a software system can effectively help developers collaborate in a distributed setting