Sensing Software Evolution (Paperback - Black and White)

As software evolves, it increases in size, it undergoes many changes and becomes more and more complex such that it gets hard to comprehend it. To understand this abstract manner of software, research has attempted to simplify the understanding. One form of simplifying the understanding is to visualize software. Over the years, research in software visualization brought various solutions to address a software's complexity. Some visualizations used hierarchies and showed the packages, classes and methods to get an understanding of a software's structure. Others calculated metrics out of changes, hierarchies and relations of entities and present the software in a problem-oriented way. We focus on improving the perception of software in our first step. Our general approach is to use objects known from our daily life such as the simple shape of a house to represent software components.