PerfVis: Pervasive Visualization in Immersive AugmentedReality for Performance Awareness

Developers are usually unaware of the impact of code changes to the performance of software systems. Although developers can analyze the performance of a system by executing, for instance, a performance test to compare the performance of two consecutive versions of the system, changing from a programming task to a testing task would disrupt the development flow. In this paper, we propose the use of a city visualization that dynamically provides developers with a pervasive view of the continuous performance of a system. We use an immersive augmented reality device (Microsoft HoloLens) to display our visualization and extend the integrated development environment on a computer screen to use the physical space. We report on technical details of the design and implementation of our visualization tool, and discuss early feedback that we collected of its usability. Our investigation explores a new visual metaphor to support the exploration and analysis of possibly very large and multidimensional performance data. Our initial result indicates that the city metaphor can be adequate to analyze dynamic performance data on a large and non-trivial software system.Comment: ICPE'19 vision, 4 pages, 2 figure, conferenc

Overcoming Issues of 3D Software Visualization through Immersive Augmented Reality

Several usability issues (i.e., navigation, occlusion, selection, and text readability) affect the few 3D visualizations proposed to support developers on software engineering tasks. We observe that most 3D software visualizations are displayed on a standard computer screen, and hypothesize that displaying them in immersive augmented reality can help to (i) overcome usability issues of 3D visualizations, and (ii) increase their effectiveness to support software concerns. We investigate our hypothesis via a controlled experiment. In it, nine participants use 3D city visualizations displayed on a Microsoft HoloLens device to complete a set of software comprehension tasks. We further investigate our conjectures through an observational user study, in which the same participants of the experiment use a space-time cube visualization to analyze program executions. We collect data to (1) quantitatively analyze the effectiveness of visualizations in terms of user performance (i.e., completion time, correctness, and recollection), and user experience (i.e., difficulty, and emotions); and (2) qualitatively analyze how immersive augmented reality helps to overcome the limitations of 3D visualizations. We found that immersive augmented reality facilitates navigation and reduces occlusion, while performance is adequate, and developers obtain an outstanding experience. Selection and text readability still remain open issues

Umsetzung eines User Interfaces für Getaviz auf der Microsoft HoloLens

In 2016, Microsoft released the first portable mixed reality device, the HoloLens. This opened completely new possibilities for software visualisation. The aim of this thesis is the development of a porting of the software analysis tool Getaviz for mixed reality. Mixed reality introduces new challenges regarding the user interface. In order to find solutions to these challenges, this thesis concentrates on designing such a user interface. Therefore, the logic of Getaviz was not reimplemented. The results are designed to be used in a future project, allowing Getaviz itself to be used in mixed reality. Consequently, the open source code is available on GitHub. In order to assure high usability, the development process was divided into three iterations followed by evaluations with five study participants each. The frequent feedback allowed to react to problems and brought in new ideas to improve the software. This process is partly based on the concept of agile software development. The development process of this thesis resulted in an app for the HoloLens. The app can be found in the Microsoft Store by searching for „Getaviz“

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