Abstract

Visualization techniques are often used when a legacy software system becomes nearly unmaintainable, in which case software visualization can be applied to regain an understanding of the software system, such that maintenance activities can take place. One of such visualization techniques consists of identifying how a given module ended up in its current state. Therefore by visualizing the history of the source code repository, it may be possible to visualize software changes and understand how the software system has evolved over time. The presented work, which is part of the CONCEPT framework (Comprehension Of Net-CEntered Programs and Techniques) [RIL03], applies visualization techniques to any of the diagrams generated by Doxygen [HEE05] from the retrieved source code repository, in order to display software changes between two specified revisions. The graphics are obtained by reusing the powerful Graphviz Dot [GAN00] layout algorithm, which enables software engineers to easily grasp the complexity of a given module and facilitate the task of program comprehension by visualizing the system at a higher level of abstraction. Moreover, this project addresses some of the shortcomings, found in some reverse engineering tools, by providing an intuitive navigation and interaction within the generated UML diagrams. Finally, this research project is aimed to be use by any projects, which are currently using Doxygen as an online documentation tool [HEE05p], with the hope to bring visualization of software changes to these developers