Exploring Software Evolution with Class Role Stereotype Visualisation

Abstract

A major challenge for software developers in an organisation is to understand the software systems so as to perform software evolution tasks. The conventional ap proach is to examine the code, which is often arduous and time-consuming. On the other hand, visualisation is often viewed as a better way to represent data. As the usefulness of class role stereotypes has been investigated, this study is conducted to shed light on the use of evolution data of role stereotypes in visualisation in relation to performing software evolution tasks. This study aims to develop a visualisation approach, which focuses on the evolution of class role stereotypes in object-oriented software systems, using the design science research approach, along with a user study evaluating the approach in performing software evolution tasks. The user study was conducted with six participants with the context of utilising the tool in the understanding part of evolution tasks, and they were asked to work on two tasks, one with the visualisation and other without. Qualitative analysis was carried out on the data collected from the survey and the video recordings of the tasks. The analysis shows the use of the visualisation tool, named Rologram, appears to help identify the changes of responsibility and collaborations of the classes, in comparison to the approach without. It is concluded that the visualisation approach tends to be helpful in performing software evolution tasks.