Exploring the evolution of software quality with animated visualization
Exploring the evolution of software quality with animated visualization
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通过动画可视化探索软件质量的演变
DOI：
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发表时间：
2008
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Pierre Poulin
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
G. Langelier;H. Sahraoui;Pierre Poulin
评估软件质量和了解软件演化过程中的事件如何导致异常是降低软件维护成本的两个重要步骤。不幸的是，在几个版本上评估大量代码是一项非常耗时的任务，即使不是压倒性的，也不适用于一般情况。为了解决这个问题，我们设计了一个可视化框架，作为一种半自动的方法来快速调查由数千个类组成的程序，涉及数十个版本。每个版本的程序及其关联的质量特征以图形方式独立表示和显示。这些表示之间的实时导航和动画重建了通常与后续软件版本固有的一致性相关联的视觉一致性。利用这种一致性可以缩小软件不同观点之间的认知差距，并允许人类专家使用他们的视觉能力和直觉来有效地调查和理解软件演化的各种质量方面。为了说明我们的框架的兴趣，我们报告了两个案例研究的结果。
Assessing software quality and understanding how events in its evolution have lead to anomalies are two important steps toward reducing costs in software maintenance. Unfortunately, evaluation of large quantities of code over several versions is a task too time-consuming, if not overwhelming, to be applicable in general. To address this problem, we designed a visualization framework as a semi-automatic approach to quickly investigate programs composed of thousands of classes, over dozens of versions. Programs and their associated quality characteristics for each version are graphically represented and displayed independently. Real-time navigation and animation between these representations recreate visual coherences often associated with coherences intrinsic to subsequent software versions. Exploiting such coherences can reduce cognitive gaps between the different views of software, and allows human experts to use their visual capacity and intuition to efficiently investigate and understand various quality aspects of software evolution. To illustrate the interest of our framework, we report our results on two case studies.