Visualizing software dynamicities with heat maps

Interactive software visualization offers a promising support for program comprehension, including program dynamicity. We present, the extension of an existing visualization tool with heat maps to explore the time and other dimensions of software. To this end, we first propose a framework to unify the two main software dynamicities, execution and evolution. Then, this unified framework is exploited to define a visualization environment based on heat maps. We illustrate our approach on two comprehension tasks: understanding the behavior of programmers during the evolution of an application and understanding class contributions in use cases. The case studies show that the heat-map metaphor contributes to answer, more easily, many of the questions important to program comprehension.