UML time visualisation

I'm sure many of you have used or at least heard of Gource and Code Swarm. They are very nice tools for visualising the commit history of a project as it evolves.

What I am interested in is an similarly repo-driven animation of the code itself in UML form as it evolves over time.

I have put a great deal of work into refactoring and cleaning up the codebase of a project over the last 3 years and it wo开发者_StackOverflow中文版uld be really neat to be able to demo this in tangible form to management. Of course 'before' and 'after' diagrams would work, but where's the fun in that? :P

Does any such tool exist? Specifically I am looking for ObjC++ but am interested in anything available in any language.

Shout out any other tools that could make for a cool demo. Refactoring is sometimes hard to sell without having anything to show!

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Convincing your CEO about the importance of that kind of tech stuff it's always very tricky. In case you are able to show a UML history animation, I don't think it will be appreciated by any non-engineer person.

My approach is "show results". If you have a bug/changes tracking tool and you are doing refactor in a correct way, time spent on bugs or changes should drop in some way.

Do some spreadsheets, paint some charts and put it all in a presentation. Unfortunatelly, that's the kind of message that reaches CEO's minds.

Like Martin Folwer says in his book Refactoring, sometimes is better to don't tell until you have results. Then results is what you should show! (see "What Do I Tell My Manager?" chapter)

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I suspect the best you would find to do this is a research prototype developed in a university. I'm thinking of something like REFVIS. Even then it would be a lot of work to make it work with your code. That aside, automatically extracted UML diagrams tend to carry way too much detail for human consumption, so reducing this to make it presentable and informative to management would be a hard problem. I think you're posing an interesting research challenge, but not one to which you'll find a ready solution!