Although software developers are usually reluctant to use static analysis to detect issues in their source code, our automatic just-in-time static analysis assistant was integrated into an Integrated Development Environment, and was evaluated positively by its users. We conducted interviews to understand the impact of the tool on experienced developers, and how it performs in comparison with other static analyzers.

Static and dynamic evolution of software systems may be described in terms of connection additions and removals in a graph. Due to the inherent complexity of software, navigating through such a dynamic network is a non-trivial task and extracting relevant information typically involves sophisticated queries. We explore the notion of space-time cube, a well-known 3D representation of an evolving dynamic graph, to support a set of software engineering activities. CuboidMatrix is a visualization tool that offers simple and expressive navigation operations. We have evaluated our tool against two software comprehension activities, namely (i) assessing interaction of classes during a software execution and (ii) exploring the cause of breaking Lint-like quality rules over a large number of software revisions.

Quality rules are used to capture important implementation and design decisions embedded in a software system's architecture. They can automatically analyze software and assign quality grades to its components. To provide a meaningful evaluation of quality, rules have to stay up-to-date with the continuously evolving system that they describe. However one would encounter unexpected anomalies during a historical overview because the notion of quality is always changing, while the qualitative evolution analysis requires it to remain constant. To understand the anomalies in a quality history of a real-world software system we use an immersive visualization that lays out the quality fluctuations in three dimensions based on two co-evolving properties: quality rules and source code. This helps us to identify and separate the impact caused by the changes of each property, and allows us to detect significant mistakes that happened during the development process.

We present ViDI (Visual Design Inspector), a novel code review tool which focuses on quality concerns and design inspection as its cornerstones. It leverages visualization techniques to represent the reviewed software and augments the visualization with the results of quality analysis tools. To effectively understand the contribution of a reviewer in terms of the impact of her changes on the overall system quality, ViDI supports the recording and further inspection of reviewing sessions. ViDI is an advanced prototype which we will soon release to the Pharo open-source community.

Quality is a crucial property of any software system and consists of many aspects. On the one hand, quality measures how well a piece of software satisfies its functional requirements. On the other hand, it captures how easy it is to understand, test and modify a software system. While functional requirements are provided by the product owner, maintainability of software is often underestimated. Currently software quality is either assessed by experts, or presented as a list of rule violations reported by some kind of static analyzer. Both these approaches are working with a sense of quality outside of the software itself.

Modern software development sees code review as a crucial part of the process, because not only does it facilitate the sharing of knowledge about the system at hand, but it may also lead to the early detection of defects, ultimately improving the quality of the produced software. Although supported by numerous approaches and tools, code review is still in its infancy, and indeed researchers have pointed out a number of shortcomings in the state of the art. We present a critical analysis of the state of the art of code review tools and techniques, extracting a set of desired features that code review tools should possess. We then present our vision and initial implementation of a novel code review approach named Visual Design Inspection (ViDI), illustrated through a set of usage scenarios. ViDI is based on a combination of visualization techniques, design heuristics, and static code analysis techniques.

One of the fundamental principles of open-source projects is that they foster collaboration among developers, disregarding their geographical location or personal background. When it comes to software repositories collaboration is a rather ephemeral phenomenon which lacks a clear definition, and it must therefore be mined and modeled. This throws up the question whether what is mined actually maps to reality.