Visualizing Software Architecture Evolution Using Change-Sets

When trying to understand the evolution of a software system it can be useful to visualize the evolution of the system's architecture. Existing tools for viewing architectural evolution assume that what a user is interested in can be described in an unbroken sequence of time, for example the changes over the last six months. We present an alternative approach that provides a lightweight method for examining the net effect of any set of changes on a system's architecture. We also present Motive, a prototype tool that implements this approach, and demonstrate how it can be used to answer questions about software evolution by describing case studies we conducted on two Java systems.