The evolution radar: visualizing integrated logical coupling information

In software evolution research logical coupling has extensively been used to recover the hidden dependencies between source code artifacts. They would otherwise go lost because of the file-based nature of current versioning systems. Previous research has dealt with low-level couplings between files, leading to an explosion of data to be analyzed, or has abstracted the logical couplings to module level, leading to a loss of detailed information. In this paper we propose a visualization-based approach which integrates both file-level and module-level logical coupling information. This not only facilitates an in-depth analysis of the logical couplings at all granularity levels, it also leads to a precise characterization of the system modules in terms of their logical coupling dependencies.