Visual identification of software evolution patterns

Abstract

Software evolution plays a key role in the overall lifecycle of a software system. In this phase, software developers extend the capabilities and functionality of the system to meet new user requirements. However, the maintenance process could rapidly lead to phenomena of "source code deterioration". The possibility to early detect bad software evolution patterns represents a paramount opportunity to keep the application maintainable. In this paper we propose a combined visualization to identify software evolution patterns related to user requirements. Such visualization consists in showing the evolution metrics of a software system together with the implementation of its requirements. We also show some examples on how this visualization could help to identify some "common" evolution patterns.