In terms of software maintenance and comprehension, the fields of software engineering and software visualization have produced several methods and tools. However, they are typically separate tools in practice. In this paper, we present a novel methodology of combining software analysis and software visualization tools via an interactive visual workflow modeling approach. Standard software analysis tools are also limited in that they support only well-known metrics or are too complicated to use for generating custom software metrics. To address these shortcomings, our approach focuses on visual elements, their configurations, and interconnectivity rather than a data ontology and querying language. In order to test and validate our methodology, we developed a prototype tool called VIMETRIK (Visual Specification of Metrics). Our preliminary evaluation study illustrates the intuitiveness and ease-of-use of our approach with regard to understanding software measurement and analysis data
An essential component in the evolution and maintenance of large-scale software systems is to track the structure of a software system to explain how a system has evolved to its present state and to predict its future development. Current mainstream tools facilitating the structural evolution of software architecture by visualization are confined with easy to integrate visualization techniques such as node-link diagrams, while more applicable solutions have been proposed in academic research. To bridge this gap, we have incorporated additional views to a conventional tool that integrates an interactive evolving city layout and a combination of charts. However, due to a limited access to the stakeholders it was not possible to solicit them for a formal modeling process. Instead, an early prototype was developed and a controlled experiment was conducted to illustrate the vital role of such in-situ visualization techniques when aiming to understanding the evolution of software architecture.
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