Advanced Visual Metaphors and Techniques for Software Maps

Limberger, Daniel; Scheibel, Willy; Döllner, Jürgen; Trapp, Matthias

doi:10.1145/3356422.3356444

Cited by 14 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…In general, a memory city displays a grouping tree, i.e., grouped sets of heap objects, as a 3D city visualization. Such a Overview of our memory cities approach, corresponding to the typical visualization pipeline steps preprocessing, filtering, mapping, and rendering [29]. city consists of two types of structures: buildings and districts.…”

Section: A Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…If each tree node contained three values, one of them could be used to calculate a building's base area, one could be used to calculate the building's height, and one could be used to determine the building's color, providing much more information for more diverse inspections. Using more visual attributes can make the visualization richer, yet complex mappings should be used for complex tasks or expert systems only since the mappings may become challenging to perceive [29]. Thus, when designing a new software city for a certain task (such as memory cities for the task of heap memory evolution analysis), the designers first have to decide whether they want to develop an expert system or a system that is also usable by novices.…”

Section: A Generalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Software cities and similar metaphors have been applied in a variety of domains [29], [58]. For example, Langelier et al [44], [59] as well as Bohnet and Döllner [60] used software cities to visualize quality metrics of software systems.…”

Section: B Software Cities and Related Metaphorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For this, we rely on a small set of visual attributes, namely area, height, position, color, and opacity. In their taxonomy of software maps (the term software city is not uniquely defined in the software cartography domain), Limberger et al [29] presented a large set of visual attributes that can be used to map data to the software city metaphor. However, they also mention that a complex mapping [...] should be used for complex tasks or expert systems only.…”

Section: B Expert Modementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our goal is to ease the inspection and comprehension of memory growth over time, a common task in memory leak analysis, by providing an interactive and easy-to-understand visualization. Based on a work-in-progress report [27], this paper discusses the full visualization pipeline [28], [29] of memory cities, see Section III. In detail, our scientific contributions encompass:…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Memory Cities: Visualizing Heap Memory Evolution Using the Software City Metaphor

Weninger

Makor

Mössenböck

2020

2020 Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT)

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Tool support is essential to help developers in understanding the memory behavior of complex software systems. Anomalies such as memory leaks can dramatically impact application performance and can even lead to crashes. Unfortunately, most memory analysis tools lack advanced visualizations (especially of the memory evolution over time) that could facilitate developers in analyzing suspicious memory behavior.In this paper, we present Memory Cities, a technique to visualize an application's heap memory evolution over time using the software city metaphor. While this metaphor is typically used to visualize static artifacts of a software system such as class hierarchies, we use it to visualize the dynamic memory behavior of an application. In our approach, heap objects can be grouped by multiple properties such as their types or their allocation sites. The resulting object groups are visualized as buildings arranged in districts, where the size of a building corresponds to the number of heap objects or bytes it represents. Continuously updating the city over time creates the immersive feeling of an evolving city. This can be used to detect and analyze memory leaks, i.e., to search for suspicious growth behavior. Memory cities further utilize various visual attributes to ease this task. For example, they highlight strongly growing buildings using color, while making less suspicious buildings semi-transparent.We implemented memory cities as a standalone application developed in Unity, with a JSON-based interface to ensure easy data import from external tools. We show how memory cites can use data provided by AntTracks, a trace-based memory monitoring tool, and present case studies on different applications to demonstrate the tool's applicability and feasibility.

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Section: A Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Generalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: B Software Cities and Related Metaphorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: B Expert Modementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Memory Cities: Visualizing Heap Memory Evolution Using the Software City Metaphor

Weninger

Makor

Mössenböck

2020

2020 Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT)

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Visualization of Source Code Similarity Using 2.5D Semantic Software Maps

Atzberger

Cech

Scheibel

et al. 2023

Communications in Computer and Information Science

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Visual variables and configuration of software maps

Limberger

Scheibel

Döllner

et al. 2022

J Vis

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Software maps provide a general-purpose interactive user interface and information display in software analytics. This paper classifies software maps as a containment-based treemap embedded into a 3D attribute space and introduces respective terminology. It provides a comprehensive overview of advanced visual metaphors and techniques, each suitable for interactive visual analytics tasks. The metaphors and techniques are briefly described, located within a visualization pipeline model, and considered within a software map design space. The general expressiveness and applicability of visual variables are detailed and discussed. Consequent applications and use cases for different software system data and software engineering data are discussed, arguing for the versatile use of software maps in visual software analytics.

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Advanced Visual Metaphors and Techniques for Software Maps

Cited by 14 publications

References 28 publications

Memory Cities: Visualizing Heap Memory Evolution Using the Software City Metaphor

Memory Cities: Visualizing Heap Memory Evolution Using the Software City Metaphor

Visualization of Source Code Similarity Using 2.5D Semantic Software Maps

Visual variables and configuration of software maps

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