Visualizing Software Systems as Cities

Wettel, Richard; Lanza, Michele

doi:10.1109/vissof.2007.4290706

Cited by 176 publications

(114 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Other than these, CodeCity [6] and Codstruction [8] are the common tools based on city metaphor to visualize software metrics. They provide a 3D view of the software.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

SourceViz: A Tool for Supporting Software Metrics Visualization

Ilyas¹,

Bilal²,

Tariq³

et al. 2017

IJIEEB

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Abstract-Maintaining and understanding large software systems is a complex and time consuming process. Understanding the internal structure of such systems is not an easy task due to the invisible nature of software. Source Code Visualization, i.e. measuring the code metrics and then visualizing them, provides an efficient solution to this problem. There are many tools available which gives an insight to the internal structure of the software. But all of them don"t provide visualizations of hierarchical relationships and code complexity of the source code. In this paper, we present a tool named "SourceViz". This application computes different software metrics, code complexity, class-relations and then visualizes the calculated metrics in different metaphors. This visual analysis assists the project managers and software developers in understanding the static structure of the software by presenting project-level as well as class-level view.

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“…Other than these, CodeCity [6] and Codstruction [8] are the common tools based on city metaphor to visualize software metrics. They provide a 3D view of the software.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

SourceViz: A Tool for Supporting Software Metrics Visualization

Ilyas¹,

Bilal²,

Tariq³

et al. 2017

IJIEEB

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“…22, Richard Wettel and Michele Lanza proposed using a three-dimensional representation of treemap as an improvement, building the concept of data visualization through city map diagrams. We implemented this representation in our tool METRIX and parameterized it to evaluate our source-code.…”

Section: B City Map Diagramsmentioning

confidence: 99%

METRIX: a new tool to evaluate the quality of software source codes

Varet

Larrieu

2013

AIAA Infotech@Aerospace (I@A) Conference

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“…The definition of a versatile city metaphor for software visualization [WL07b]. The building blocks of our city metaphor (i.e., domain mapping, concept mapping, property mapping) as well as the set of techniques we used to materialize this metaphor for software visualization (e.g., two novel layout algorithms, a comparison between different mapping strategies) are described and illustrated in Chapter 3.…”

Section: Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We chose a city metaphor [WL07b] for our software visualization approach, due to the many similarities between software and civil engineering, which enable a straightforward and intuitive mapping between the two domains. Moreover, a city is an intrinsically complex construct and can only be incrementally explored, in the same way the understanding of a complex system increases step by step.…”

Section: Partmentioning

confidence: 99%

Software systems as cities

Wettel

Lanza

Robbes

2011

Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering

Self Cite

148

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Software understanding takes up a large share of the total cost of a software system. The high costs attributed to software understanding activities are caused by the size and complexity of software systems, by the continuous evolution that these systems are subject to, and by the lack of physical presence which makes software intangible. Reverse engineering helps practitioners deal with the intrinsic complexity of software, by providing a broad range of patterns and techniques. One of these techniques is software visualization, which makes software more tangible, by providing visible representations of software systems.Interpreting a visualization is by no means trivial and requires knowledge about the visual language of the visualization. One means to ease the learning of a new visualization's language are metaphors, which allow the interpretation of new data representations by analogy. Possibly one of the most popular metaphors for software visualization is the city metaphor, which has been explored in the past by a number of researchers. However, in spite of the efforts, the value of this metaphor for reverse engineering has never been taken beyond anecdotical evidence.In this dissertation, we demonstrate the value of the city metaphor for reverse engineering along two directions. On the one hand, we show that the metaphor is versatile enough to allow the representation of different facets of software. On the other hand, we show that the city metaphor enables the creation of software visualizations which efficiently and effectively support reverse engineering activities.Our interpretation of the city metaphor at its core depicts the system as a city, the packages as districts, and the classes as buildings. The resulting "code city" visualization provides a structural overview of the software system, enriched with contextual data. To be able to perform analyses of real systems using our approach, we implemented a tool called CodeCity.We demonstrate the versatility of the metaphor, by using it in three different analysis contexts, i.e., program comprehension, software evolution analysis, and software design quality assessment. For each of the contexts, we describe the visualization techniques we employ to encode the contextual data in the visualization and we illustrate the application by means of case studies. The insights gained in the three analysis contexts are complementary to each other, leading to an increasingly more complete "big picture" of the systems.We then demonstrate how the visualizations built on top of our city metaphor effectively and efficiently support reverse engineering activities, by means of an extensive controlled experiment. The design of our experiment is based on a list of desiderata that we extracted from our survey of the current body of research. We conducted the experiment over a period of six months, in four sites located in three countries, with a heterogeneous sample of subjects composed of fair shares of both academics and industry practitioners. The main result of ...

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Visualizing Software Systems as Cities

Cited by 176 publications

References 17 publications

SourceViz: A Tool for Supporting Software Metrics Visualization

SourceViz: A Tool for Supporting Software Metrics Visualization

METRIX: a new tool to evaluate the quality of software source codes

Software systems as cities

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