Of Changes and their History: Some Ideas for Future IDEs

Harald C. Galls.e.a.l. – software evolution and architecture lab

Department of InformaticsUniversity of Zurich, Switzerland

http://seal.ifi.uzh.ch

Abstract

Changes are the heartbeat of a software system. Software has to change to reflect the adapting requirements of business,processes, and technology; otherwise it becomes progressively less useful. Because of that, software typically grows andbecomes more complex inducing more time and effort for evolving it. Software archives provide rich sources of informa-tion about systems and their history of changes. From that we can learn and benefit in steering the evolution of a softwaresystem both technically and organizationally. In our research, we have investigated change histories from multiple perspec-tives: change couplings, change types, developer networks, component dependencies, evolution metrics, etc. Combined witheffective visualizations, change histories have shown to be extremely useful for guiding software development. But that in-formation can also be used to reflect how a future IDE might better support the developer given that all the data about asoftware project is accessible. For that we review some of the major achievements in software evolution analysis and presentour evolution analysis platform called EVOLIZER to address what we can learn from mining change histories and how tointegrate that in future IDEs.

2008 15th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering

1095-1350/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE

DOI 10.1109/WCRE.2008.56

3

2008 15th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering

1095-1350/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE

DOI 10.1109/WCRE.2008.56

3

2008 15th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering

1095-1350/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE

DOI 10.1109/WCRE.2008.56

3

2008 15th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering

1095-1350/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE

DOI 10.1109/WCRE.2008.56

3

2008 15th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering

1095-1350/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE

DOI 10.1109/WCRE.2008.56

3