Visualizing the Evolution of Software Systems using the Forest Metaphor

We present an approach based on a forest metaphor to ease the comprehension of evolving object oriented software systems. The approach takes advantages of familiar concepts such as forests of trees, sub-forest of trees, trunks, branches, leaves, and colour of the leaves. In particular, each release of a software system is represented as a forest that software maintainers can navigate and interact with. Maintainers can pass from a release to another one, so understanding how the entire software and its classes evolve throughout the past releases. The approach has been implemented as a 3D interactive environment tool. A preliminary empirical evaluation has been conducted to assess that environment and its underlying approach.