White Coats: Web-Visualization of Evolving Software in 3D

Abstract

Versioning systems to store, handle, and retrieve the evolution of software systems have become a common good practice for both industrial and open-source software systems, currently exemplified by the wide usage of the CVS system. The stored information can then be manually retrieved over a command line or looked at with a browser using the ViewCVS tool. However, the information contained in the repository is difficult to navigate as ViewCVS provides only a textual view of single versions of the source files. In this paper we present an approach to visualize a CVS repository in 3D (using VRML) by means of a visualization service called White Coats. The viewer can easily navigate and interact with the visualized information