Explora: Tackling Corpus Analysis with a Distributed Architecture

When analysing a corpus of software, researchers often ask questions that entail exploration and navigation, such as “what packages contain fat interfaces in open-source systems?”, “how consistently is the code being commented?” and “are naming conventions being followed?”. The answers to these questions can impact software maintainability and evolution. Software visualisation can be of aid to understanding and exploring the answers to such questions, but corpus visualisations are timeconsuming and difficult to achieve since they require large amounts of data to be processed. We tackle this constrain by using a distributed architecture. In this paper we propose an environment where researchers can build queries for their questions and afterwards rapidly visualise them. We elaborate on a proof-of-concept tool named Explora and we report early results when visualising Qualitas Corpus [4]. This paper uses colours in the figures. Please read a coloured printout of this paper for a better understanding.