EvoGraph: A Lightweight Approach to Evolutionary and Structural Analysis of Large Software Systems

Structural analyses frequently fall short in an adequate representation of historical changes for retrospective analysis. By compounding the two underlying information spaces in a single approach, the comprehension about the interaction between evolving requirements and system development can be improved significantly. We therefore propose a lightweight approach based on release history data and source code changes, which first selects entities with evolutionary outstanding characteristics and then indicates their structural dependencies via commonly used source code entities. The resulting data sets and visualizations aim at a holistic view to point out and assess structural stability, recurring modifications, or changes in the dependencies of the file-sets under inspection. In this paper we describe our approach and its results in terms of the Mozilla case study. Our approach completes typical release history mining and source code analysis approaches, therefore past restructuring events, new, shifted, and removed dependencies can be spotted easily