AC2 -- Towards Understanding Architectural Changes in Rapid Releases

TL;DR

AC2 is a visualization tool designed to help developers understand architectural changes in rapidly released open source Python projects by comparing different releases through various graphical views.

Contribution

The paper introduces AC2, a novel visualization tool that displays architectural changes at multiple abstraction levels using call and collaboration graphs.

Findings

Supports examination of architectural evolution between releases

Helps identify increasing architectural complexity

Facilitates understanding of component interactions over time

Abstract

Open source projects are adopting faster release cycles that reflect various changes. Therefore, comprehending the effects of these changes on software's architecture over the releases becomes necessary. However, it is challenging to keep architecture in-check and add new changes simultaneously for every release. To this end, we propose a visualization tool called AC2, which allows its users to examine the alterations in the architecture at both higher and lower levels of abstraction for the python projects. AC2 uses call graphs and collaboration graphs to show the interaction between different architectural components. The tool provides four different views to see the architectural changes. The user can examine two releases at a time to comprehend the architectural changes between the releases. AC2 can support the maintainers and developers to observe changes in the project and its influence on the architecture, which allow them to see its increasing complexity over the releases at the component level. AC2 can be downloaded at https://github.com/dheerajrox/AC2 and its demo can be seen at the website https://dheerajrox.github.io/AC2doc or on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNrJfZ0RCVI