A Proposal towards the Design of an Architecture for Evolutionary Visual Software Analytics

The analysis of software systems, their evolution and visualization are dynamic research areas that have produced several promising methods. However, the use of these approaches has not been widely incorporated into practice because of the limited number of full featured open source and commercial tools available, and the absence of training for students and practitioners on their use. This research proposes the design of an architecture according to the results of previous research and the requirements of programmers and project managers of three companies that are sponsoring the project: a large international bank and two software development companies. The design of the architecture takes into account the need for an extensible and scalable architecture to incorporate new and existing methods to retrieve source code from different versioning systems, to carry out the advanced analysis of programs written in different languages, to perform the calculation of software metrics and to make visible the results of the analysis by means of visual representations, incorporated as Eclipse and Visual Studio extensions. The main contribution of this research is the design of an architecture to support the development of a architecture for evolutionary visual software analytics. The results obtained, so far, in the implementation of the architecture and the tests carried out are satisfactory, although, its validation with the partnering companies has not been carried out, yet.