Temporal Exploration of Software Models: A Tool Feature to Enhance Software Understanding

We present an eclipse plugin called temporal model explorer (TME) that allows a software engineer to animate how software has changed over time by sliding a scrollbar. The engineer can instantly study changes made at any level of detail. Rationale for changes can also be manipulated, and filters can be applied to hide aspects of the history that are not of interest. Although simple, we hypothesized that this tool might be appreciated by software engineers and might improve their ability to understand and reverse engineer software. This paper presents a study in which we evaluated TME against these hypotheses. The study involved 12 participants who answered questions about UML class diagrams drawn using IBM's rational software modeler. For some of the diagrams, the participants were able to use TME. The participants found TME useful, and agreed that they would use it if it was available in their work environment.