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is commented in a better way. For the class selected in the JEdit system,
we can observe a different shape of trees. This difference is due to the total
number of methods that increased in the class of release 4.3. The different
relationships between public and private methods also affected the shapes
of the trees: the number of public methods is much larger than private
methods. Regarding the class considered for JHotDraw, we may observe
that the branches of all the trees point up, indicating that the number of
public methods is close to the number of the private ones. The main
difference among the three trees is that the total number of methods is
larger in releases 7.0.8 and 7.1. This difference results in a slight
difference in the tree shapes.
The use of our 3D environment on the selected systems leads to the
following two considerations: (i) Scalability. The environment did not
scale up very well on large software systems when the number of releases
to be analyzed increased (e.g., JEdit). To address this issue, we plan to
implement a new version of our environment based on a state-of-the-art
3D engine such as Unreal Engine. (ii) Completeness. Our approach and
environment provide a fair amount of information for an overview of the
system and offer a proper representation for methods, attributes, and
comments.
Conclusion and Future Work
In this chapter, we have presented an approach for the visualization of
evolving software systems. The approach is based on the forest metaphor
presented in [12][13]. It provides features to navigate in the forest as a free
fly 3D virtual camera. Our prototype also implements zoom features and
visualizes several attributes of the classes (e.g., the names and the values
of the metrics) to promote comprehension at a fine-grained level.
To assess the validity of the approach, we have also conducted a
preliminary case study on three open source software systems implemented
in Java. To improve our understanding of these results, further empirical
investigations on different releases of evolving software systems are
required. User studies to evaluate the effectiveness of this new proposal in
the execution of maintenance and comprehension tasks will be conducted.
Finally, future work will be devoted to increasing the realism of the forest
and to assessing whether more realistic forests give increased support for
maintainers in the execution of maintenance tasks.
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