An Infrastructure for Software Release Analysis through Provenance Graphs

TL;DR

Releasy is a tool that generates provenance graphs to visualize and analyze software evolution in continuous delivery projects, aiding in tracking changes, features, and developer involvement.

Contribution

It introduces Releasy, a novel tool for producing and analyzing provenance graphs to support software release analysis in continuous delivery environments.

Findings

Successfully generated changelogs for open source projects

Enabled visualization of software evolution and developer contributions

Supported queries for implicit information extraction

Abstract

Nowadays, quickly evolving and delivering software through a continuous delivery process is a competitive advantage and a way to keep software updated in response to the frequent changes in customers' requirements. However, the faster the software release cycle, the more challenging to track software evolution. In this paper, we propose Releasy, a tool that aims at supporting projects that use continuous delivery by generating and reporting their release provenance. The provenance generated by Releasy allows graphical visualization of the software evolution and supports queries to discover implicit information, such as the implemented features of each release and the involved developers. We also show in this paper a preliminary evaluation of Releasy in action, generating the changelog of an open source project with the provenance collected by our tool.