SYN: Ultra-Scale Software Evolution Comprehension

About SYN

The comprehension of very large-scale software system evolution remains a challenging problem due to the sheer amount of time-based (i.e., a sequence of changes) data and its intrinsically complex nature (i.e., heterogeneous changes across the entire system source code). It is a necessary step for program comprehension, as systems are not simply created out of thin air in a bang, but are the sum of many changes over long periods of time, by various actors and due to various circumstances. We present SYN, a web-based tool that uses versatile vi- sualization and data processing techniques to create scalable depictions of ultra-scale software system evolution. SYN has been successfully applied on several systems versioned on GitHub, including the nearly 20-year history of the Linux operating system, which totals more than one million commits on more than 100k evolving files.

Live DEMO & Video

A live DEMO of SYN is available at its project homepage.

A video demonstration of its usage is available on YouTube.

Built With

List of major frameworks/libraries used to bootstrap SYN.

Frontend

ReactJS
Babylon
Apollo GraphQL

Backend

Java
SpringBoot
JGit

Getting Started

Build local container images and run SYN by following these simple example steps.

Prerequisites

Docker needs to be installed in the machine.
Min. Java 18 to build the server.

Building Docker Images

Follow these steps to build and run the SYN docker containers:

Clone the repo
```
git clone https://github.com/....
```
Build the backend
```
cd syn-backend
sh build.sh
cd ..
```

Build the frontend

cd syn-frontend
docker-compose build
cd ..

Usage

First, create a project with SYN-CLI using the following command (replace the :projectName and :projectGitHubURL variables):

docker run --rm --volume "$(pwd)/syn_data:/syn_data" -e SYN_HOME=/syn_data syn-cli project create -n :projectName -p :projectGitHubURL

For example:

docker run --rm --volume "$(pwd)/syn_data:/syn_data" -e SYN_HOME=/syn_data syn-cli project create -n JetUML -p https://github.com/prmr/JetUML

Once the project is created, it can be analyzed with the following command (-p is the project id, -t is the number of threads):
```
docker run --rm --volume "$(pwd)/syn_data:/syn_data" -e SYN_HOME=/syn_data syn-cli analyze auto -p 1 -t 1
```
To inspect the analyzed project, spin up the containers:
```
docker-compose up
```
Finally, open SYN in a browser.

License

See LICENSE for more information.

SYN

Install / Use

README