Скачать или смотреть Exploring Software Change Dynamics in Large-Scale Historical Datasets – VISSOFT 2025

Long lived software projects encompass a large number of artifacts, which undergo many revisions throughout their history.
Empirical software engineering researchers studying software evolution gather and collect datasets with millions of events, representing changes introduced to specific artifacts.

In this paper we explore how to use an interactive density scatterplot -- a simple visualization -- to provide a global overview of large historical datasets mined from open source repositories. The visualization helps researchers characterize datasets and compare the histories of individual artifacts, both in terms of 1) observing how rapidly different artifacts age over multiple-year-long time spans 2) how often metrics associated with each artifacts tend towards an improvement.

The paper shows how the tool can be tailored to specific analysis needs (pace of change comparison, clone detection, freshness assessment) thanks to its support for flexible configuration of history scaling and alignment along the time axis, artifacts sorting and interactive color mapping, enabling the analysis of millions of events obtained by mining the histories of tens of thousands of software artifacts. We include an evaluation using datasets gathering specific artifacts (OpenAPI descriptions, GitHub workflow definitions) across multiple repositories, as well as diving into the history of specific popular open source projects.

The tool is available online at: https://design.inf.usi.ch/evoscat

This video accompanies the submission of the research paper titled "Evolution Scatterplot: Exploring Software Change Dynamics in Large-Scale Historical Datasets" authored by Souhaila Serbout, Diana Carolina Muñoz Hurtado, Hassan Atwi, Edoardo Riggio, and Cesare Pautasso (DESIGN @ Software Institute – USI Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland)