Visualizing the Evolution of Systems and Their Library Dependencies

Abstract

System maintainers face several challenges stemming from a system and its library dependencies evolving separately. Novice maintainers may lack the historical knowledge required to efficiently manage an inherited system. While some libraries are regularly updated, some systems keep a dependency on older versions. On the other hand, maintainers may be unaware that other systems have settled on a different version of a library. In this paper, we visualize how the dependency relation between a system and its dependencies evolves from two perspectives. Our system-centric dependency plots (SDP) visualize the successive library versions a system depends on over time. The radial layout and heat-map metaphor provide visual clues about the change in dependencies along the system's release history. From this perspective, maintainers can navigate to a library-centric dependants diffusion plot (LDP). The LDP is a time-series visualization that shows the diffusion of users across the different versions of a library. We demonstrate on real-world systems how maintainers can benefit from our visualizations through four case scenarios.