The use of information visualization to support software configuration management

Abstract

This paper addresses the visualization of the collaboration history in the development of software items using a simple interactive representation called Revision Tree. The visualization presents detailed information on a single software item with the intention of supporting the awareness of the project managers and developers about the item evolution and the collaboration taking place on its development. We considered that repositories of Software Configuration Management tools are the best information source to extract relevant information dealing with the relationships between the programmers and software items, as well as information regarding the creation of baselines, branches and revisions, and useful date and time details for the arrangement of the development timeline and collaboration representation. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2007.