Using Interactive Animations to Analyze Fine-grained Software Evolution

Understanding the evolution of software systems is a challenging task, due to their sheer size and complexity. Several visualization approaches have been presented over the years, using both 2D and 3D depictions. The vast majority of the approaches is geared towards understanding the “big picture”, facilitating the comprehension of the overall evolution. However, when it comes to understanding the basic building blocks of software evolution, i.e., the commits performed by the developers, visualization seems to fall short in favor of the de facto standard of textual diff views. We present an approach, implemented in a custom tool, to depict commits using interactive animations which allow the viewer to inspect and dissect the intricacies of one or multiple commits. We illustrate our approach on a number of case studies, showing its potential benefits.