Visualisation for informed decision making; from code to components

Abstract-Software is usually complex and always intangible. In practice, the development and maintenance processes are timeconsuming activities mainly because software complexity is difficult to manage. Graphical visualization of software has the potential to result in a better and faster understanding of its design and functionality, thus saving time and providing valuable information to improve its quality. However, visualizing software is not an easy task because of the huge amount of information comprised in the software. Furthermore, the information content increases significantly once the time dimension to visualize the evolution of the software is taken into account. Human perception of information and cognitive factors must thus be taken into account to improve the understandability of the visualization. In this paper, we survey visualization techniques, both 2D-and 3D-based, representing the static aspects of the software and its evolution. We categorize these techniques according to the issues they focus on, in order to help compare them and identify the most relevant techniques and tools for a given problem.

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“…Knight and Munro [126] were the first to try representing software as Cities. They named their visualization "The Software World" [14], [127].…”

Section: Visualizing Software Organizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visualization of the Static Aspects of Software: A Survey

Caserta

Zendra

2011

IEEE Trans. Visual. Comput. Graphics

113

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“…In [4], the same authors increased the granularity and applied this idea for the representation of the components in a software system and mapped semantic information (number of contained components) on the type of the building.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite the proven usefulness of 2D visualizations, they do not allow the viewer to be immersed in a visualization, and the feeling is that we are looking at things from "outside". 3D visualizations [3,4,11,15,17] on the other hand provide the potential to create such an immersive experience, but there has been little research in software visualization on this aspect. Existing 3D visualizations of software (such as [15,17]), while being visually appealing, fail at producing the immersive feeling, because they lack locality: the objects in the 3D space can be freely moved and the viewer is allowed too much freedom of movement, leading to disorientation -one of the main arguments against 3D visualizations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visualizing Software Systems as Cities

Wettel¹,

Lanza²

2007

2007 4th IEEE International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis

176

104

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This paper presents a 3D visualization approach which gravitates around the city metaphor, i.e., an object-oriented software system is represented as a city that can be traversed and interacted with: the goal is to give the viewer a sense of locality to ease program comprehension.The key point in conceiving a realistic software city is to map the information about the source code in meaningful ways in order to take the approach beyond beautiful pictures.We investigated several concepts that contribute to the urban feeling, such as appropriate layouts, topology, and facilities to ease navigation and interaction.We experimented our approach on a number of systems, and present our findings.

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“…Then the room metaphor got its independent value and was actively used in human-computer interface systems and the software visualization (Greenberg & Roseman, 1998). The other three-dimensional metaphor -a "landscape" metaphor is also actively used in systems of software visualization and information visualization (Balzer et al, 2004), (Charters et al, 2002). In case of "room" metaphor we can't write the full metaphor formula because there are no a common application area, successful and convincing examples of its usage, and, that is there is no a unity of target domain.…”

Section: Metaphor Propertiesmentioning

confidence: 99%