Towards Actionable Visualization for Software Developers

Abundant studies have shown that visualization is advantageous for software developers, yet adopting visualization during software development is not a common practice due to the large effort involved in finding an appropriate visualization. Developers require support to facilitate that task. Among 368 papers in SOFTVIS/VISSOFT venues, we identify 86 design study papers about the application of visualization to relieve concerns in software development. We extract from these studies the task, need, audience, data source, representation, medium and tool; and we characterize them according to the subject, process and problem domain. On the one hand, we support software developers to put visualization in action by mapping existing visualization techniques to particular needs from different perspectives. On the other hand, we highlight the problem domains that are overlooked in the field and need more support

Development of a 3d tool for visualization of different software artifacts and their relationships

Este trabajo se enfoca en el desarrollo de una herramienta de visualización de software que permite analizar diferentes artefactos de software como código fuente y bases de datos relacionales. Por su naturaleza, la herramienta creada propone una metáfora basada en desarrollos anteriores del campo de visualización de software. La primera parte del documento de tesis presenta un estado del arte en el área de visualización de software, esto incluye la forma en cómo esta área aporta al proceso de evolución de software, punto muy importante en la ingeniería de software. Posteriormente se presenta la fundamentación básica de SeeIT 3D (nombre de la herramienta desarrollada): su metáfora, métricas, mecanismos para entrada de datos y tecnologías que hacen parte de la arquitectura interna. Luego, con el fin de validar la funcionalidad de la herramienta y dar soporte a los fundamentos en los que se basa, se evaluaron un conjunto de proyectos de código abierto escritos en lenguaje Java, que por su tamaño medio e historia bien definida en el área que representan, proveen un buen marco de evaluación. Finalmente como resultado del trabajo de tesis es posible concluir que la visualización de software realmente da un buen soporte a las tareas asociadas al proceso de evolución de software, brindando mecanismos que permiten comprender más fácilmente los artefactos producidos durante el desarrollo de software. De igual manera se concluyen que SeeIT 3D es una buena aproximación y un avance en el campo dadas sus capacidades. / Abstract.This work is focused in the development of a software visualization tool that is able to analyze different software artifacts such as source code and relational databases. Because of its nature, the tool proposes a metaphor based on previous works developed in the software visualization field. The beginning of the thesis document presents a state of art of software visualization; it includes how visualization supports the process of software evolution. After that the basis of SeeIT 3D (name of the developed tool) is presented e.g. the metaphor, metrics, input mechanism and technologies that conform its internal architecture. In order to validate the functionality of the tool and give support to the concepts it is based on, a set of open source projects written in Java language was evaluated. These projects have a medium size and a well-defined history in the field they represent that provide an adequate evaluation framework for the tool. Finally as a result of the thesis work it is possible to conclude that software visualization really provides enough support for the task associated with the evolution process of software systems. It is provided by giving mechanisms that allow understanding the produced software artifacts easily. It is also possible to concluded that SeeIT 3D is a good approximation and a step forward in the field due to its capabilities.Maestrí

The Medium of Visualization for Software Comprehension

Although abundant studies have shown how visualization can help software developers to understand software systems, visualization is still not a common practice since developers (i) have little support to find a proper visualization for their needs, and once they find a suitable visualization tool, they (ii) are unsure of its effectiveness. We aim to offer support for identifying proper visualizations, and to increase the effectiveness of visualization techniques. In this dissertation, we characterize proposed software visualizations. To fill the gap between proposed visualizations and their practical application, we encapsulate such characteristics in an ontology, and propose a meta-visualization approach to find suitable visualizations. Amongst others characteristics of software visualizations, we identify that the medium used to display them can be a means to increase the effectiveness of visualization techniques for particular comprehension tasks.We implement visualization prototypes and validate our thesis via experiments. We found that even though developers using a physical 3D model medium required the least time to deal with tasks that involve identifying outliers, they perceived the least difficulty when visualizing systems based on the standard computer screen medium. Moreover, developers using immersive virtual reality obtained the highest recollection. We conclude that the effectiveness of software visualizations that use the city metaphor to support comprehension tasks can be increased when city visualizations are rendered in an appropriate medium. Furthermore, that visualization of software visualizations can be a suitable means for exploring their multiple characteristics that can be properly encapsulated in an ontology

Close and Distant Reading Visualizations for the Comparative Analysis of Digital Humanities Data

Traditionally, humanities scholars carrying out research on a specific or on multiple literary work(s) are interested in the analysis of related texts or text passages. But the digital age has opened possibilities for scholars to enhance their traditional workflows. Enabled by digitization projects, humanities scholars can nowadays reach a large number of digitized texts through web portals such as Google Books or Internet Archive. Digital editions exist also for ancient texts; notable examples are PHI Latin Texts and the Perseus Digital Library. This shift from reading a single book “on paper” to the possibility of browsing many digital texts is one of the origins and principal pillars of the digital humanities domain, which helps developing solutions to handle vast amounts of cultural heritage data – text being the main data type. In contrast to the traditional methods, the digital humanities allow to pose new research questions on cultural heritage datasets. Some of these questions can be answered with existent algorithms and tools provided by the computer science domain, but for other humanities questions scholars need to formulate new methods in collaboration with computer scientists. Developed in the late 1980s, the digital humanities primarily focused on designing standards to represent cultural heritage data such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) for texts, and to aggregate, digitize and deliver data. In the last years, visualization techniques have gained more and more importance when it comes to analyzing data. For example, Saito introduced her 2010 digital humanities conference paper with: “In recent years, people have tended to be overwhelmed by a vast amount of information in various contexts. Therefore, arguments about ’Information Visualization’ as a method to make information easy to comprehend are more than understandable.” A major impulse for this trend was given by Franco Moretti. In 2005, he published the book “Graphs, Maps, Trees”, in which he proposes so-called distant reading approaches for textual data that steer the traditional way of approaching literature towards a completely new direction. Instead of reading texts in the traditional way – so-called close reading –, he invites to count, to graph and to map them. In other words, to visualize them. This dissertation presents novel close and distant reading visualization techniques for hitherto unsolved problems. Appropriate visualization techniques have been applied to support basic tasks, e.g., visualizing geospatial metadata to analyze the geographical distribution of cultural heritage data items or using tag clouds to illustrate textual statistics of a historical corpus. In contrast, this dissertation focuses on developing information visualization and visual analytics methods that support investigating research questions that require the comparative analysis of various digital humanities datasets. We first take a look at the state-of-the-art of existing close and distant reading visualizations that have been developed to support humanities scholars working with literary texts. We thereby provide a taxonomy of visualization methods applied to show various aspects of the underlying digital humanities data. We point out open challenges and we present our visualizations designed to support humanities scholars in comparatively analyzing historical datasets. In short, we present (1) GeoTemCo for the comparative visualization of geospatial-temporal data, (2) the two tag cloud designs TagPies and TagSpheres that comparatively visualize faceted textual summaries, (3) TextReuseGrid and TextReuseBrowser to explore re-used text passages among the texts of a corpus, (4) TRAViz for the visualization of textual variation between multiple text editions, and (5) the visual analytics system MusikerProfiling to detect similar musicians to a given musician of interest. Finally, we summarize our and the collaboration experiences of other visualization researchers to emphasize the ingredients required for a successful project in the digital humanities, and we take a look at future challenges in that research field