Visualizing protected variations in evolving software designs

Identifying and tracking evolving software structures at a design level is a challenging task. Although there are ways to visualize this information statically, there is a need for methods that help analyzing the evolution of software design elements. In this paper, we present a new visual approach to identify variability zones in software designs and explore how they evolve over time. To verify the usefulness of our approach, we did a user study in which participants had to browse software histories and find visual patterns. Most participants were able to find interesting observations and found our approach intuitive and useful. We present a number of design aspects that were observed by participants and the authors using our IHVis tool on four open-source projects.