Visualizing Evolution and Performance Metrics on Method Level as Multivariate Data

Visualizing the evolution of software metrics helps understanding the project progress of a software development team with respect to code quality and related characteristics. Blending this information with performance information can provide relevant insights into crucial changes in execution behavior and their respective context from code changes. We interpret this composition of evolution and performance metrics as multivariate data and map it to a fine-grained method level. This is the basis for investigating a multivariate visualization approach consisting of a visually enriched tabular representation that provides the method-level details for all the metrics across time, a projection view that shows clusters and outliers among the methods on a higher-level of abstraction, and a timeline view to find relevant temporal changes. Interactions connect the views and allow the users to explore the data step by step.

Hagen Tarner will present our approach on visualizing evolution and performance metrics at this year's Seminar Series on Advanced Techniques & Tools for Software Evolution (SATToSE). The document is available on our website.

The approach was developed in the DFG-funded project "SoftwareDynamics²" together with scientists from Austria. The prototype of the implementation was developed during the ViVaSD - Visualizing Variability in Software Dynamics project group in summer semester 2019, here at UDE.