SysMap: A Lightweight Software Visualization Tool to Analyze the Software Evolution of a System

TL;DR

SysMap is a lightweight 3D visualization tool that analyzes software evolution by visualizing source code metrics over different versions, aiding developers and analysts in understanding system changes efficiently.

Contribution

It introduces a novel lightweight tool that visualizes software evolution using 3D graphics based on source code metrics, reducing manual effort.

Findings

Successfully visualized multiple open-source Java projects.

Enhanced understanding of software evolution through graphical representation.

Reduced manual effort in analyzing software changes.

Abstract

Software visualization helps to comprehend the system by providing a vivid illustration. The developers, as well as the analysts, can have a glance over the total system to understand the basic changes over time from a high-level point of view through this technique. In recent years, many tools are proposed to visualize software based on different architectural metaphors, such as as- solar system, city or park. Some of the solutions have just worked on system visualization where a few tried to explain the changes in software throughout different versions that still need heavy manual work. Keeping such limitations in mind, this paper proposes a lightweight tool named SysMap that takes the source codes of different versions of software systems, provides 3D illustrations of those systems and a graphical statistic of its evolution. To build the graphical element to represent the system, the source code has been studied to find out different software metrics. For experimentation, several open-source java projects were chosen to find out the necessary information. Henceforth, this tool will surely increase the work efficiency of both the developer and analyst by reducing the manual effort and by providing the graphical view to comprehend the software evolution over time.