Visualization of the Static aspects of Software: a survey

International audienceSoftware is usually complex and always intangible. In practice, the development and maintenance processes are time-consuming 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, 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

Software Journeys

Getting familiar with the code is a challenging activity and therefore resource intensive. The larger the software code base, the larger the resource expenditure. We consider software development in the case of established software developed by mid to large mature teams. This thesis explores a new way of documenting code that could increase the productivity of software development. The method consists of creating small, dynamically-ordered sets of code locations called Landmarks. These sets called Journeys are significant for a feature. The landmarks contain documentation related to system behavior and qualitative system state information at the time when the software execution reaches the locations. This new type of documentation is very light and does not require extensive additional software systems for management. This information is stored, and shared in a seamless manner via the existing source control systems. An experiment was performed to gauge the efficiency of this method versus the current development practice. The difference of productivity between developers not using this approach versus developers benefiting from this approach was captured. The results could be qualitatively interpreted as pointing towards an overall increase of productivity for the participant developers using the new approach.1 yea

Evaluating Extensible 3D (X3D) Graphics For Use in Software Visualisation

3D web software visualisation has always been expensive, special purpose, and hard to program. Most of the technologies used require large amounts of scripting, are not reliable on all platforms, are binary formats, or no longer maintained. We can make end-user web software visualisation of object-oriented programs cheap, portable, and easy by using Extensible (X3D) 3D Graphics, which is a new open standard. In this thesis we outline our experience with X3D and discuss the suitability of X3D as an output format for software visualisation