Maleku: an evolutionary visual software analytics tool for providing insights into software evolution

Software maintenance is a complex process that requires the understanding and comprehension of software project details. It involves the understanding of the evolution of the software project, hundreds of software components and the relationships among software items in the form of inheritance, interface implementation, coupling and cohesion. Consequently, the aim of evolutionary visual software analytics is to support software project managers and developers during software maintenance. It takes into account the mining of evolutionary data, the subsequent analysis of the results produced by the mining process for producing evolution facts, the use of visualizations supported by interaction techniques and the active participation of users. Hence, this paper proposes an evolutionary visual software analytics tool for the exploration and comparison of project structural, interface implementation and class hierarchy data, and the correlation of structural data with metrics, as well as socio-technical relationships. Its main contribution is a tool that automatically retrieves evolutionary software facts and represent them using a scalable visualization design

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

Visualizing and Analyzing the Structure of AspectJ Software under the Eclipse Platform

Software is naturally intangible and abstract which makes the understanding task difficult. There is a growing need for visualizations that improve the comprehensiveness of its structure, behavior and evolution. Graphically visualizing abstract concepts provides a way to raise the abstraction level and therefore, to reduce the software complexity. The graphical synthetic view that gives a quick idea of its content, logic, structure and its entities' relationships. It is widely accepted that it can represent a valuable support during the development and maintenance processes. As AspectJ is a relatively new language with powerful specific constructs, it deserves support tools to visualize its software systems. This paper presents our recent work in software visualization with respect to analyze and visualize the AspectJ software structures using graphical elements well-known from daily life such as the Polymetric View and the City Metaphor to conduct various powerful analyses and permit an intuitive understanding of a given visualization and therefore, to get quickly an overview of a huge and complex software. VizzAspectJ-2D and VizzAspectJ-3D are two tools support we have built on top of the Eclipse platform respectively for the 2D and 3D visualizations