DEVis: A tool for visualizing software document evolution

Abstract

During the software development process many technical documents are produced. Such documents and their evolution history contain rich information about the development process. Analyzing these document changes may reveal regularities and anomalies which are helpful to understand the software system and its development process. In this paper, we propose DEVis, an interactive visualization tool to visualize the software documentation evolution and aid the tasks of analyzing software development process. We initially evaluated our tool using the knowledge task-based framework and discuss the challenging aspects and lessons learned during the development of DEVis.