The Small Project Observatory

Maintenance is an important activity in software engineering with studies attributing it more than 75% of the total cost of a system. More than half the time dedicated to maintenance is spent on reverse engineering the code which often is the only accurate source of information. In this context, among the many approaches, software visualization tools have long been seen as an important asset to support the comprehension process, offering facilities to understand a given software system. However, systems do not exist in isolation, but they exist in the context of organizations, research groups or open-source communities. We call these larger contexts, that contain version repositories for multiple systems in parallel, “super-repositories”. We argue that there is a need for software visualization tools that support the reverse-engineering of such super-repositories. We present a tool called the Small Project Observatory (SPO) that supports the visualization and interactive exploration of super-repositories.