Evolution analysis with animated and 3D-visualizations

Large software systems typically exist in many revisions. In order to analyze such systems, their evolution needs to be analyzed, too. The main challenge in this context is to cope with the large volume of data and to visualize the system and its evolution as a whole. This paper presents an approach for visualizing the evolution of large-scale systems which uses three different, tightly integrated visualizations that are 3-dimensional and/or animated and which support different analysis tasks. According to a first empirical study, all tasks are supported well by at least one visualization.